THE SUN sets softly over Doha as its sheen casts on the mirrored facades and muted dune-coloured neighbourhoods before fading into the vast Gulf, with the sandy desert stretching out kilometres away. In this oasis of turquoise waters, steel greys and traditional beige, the Lawh Wa Qalam: MF Husain Museum stands out in the expansive Education City campus, cloaked in cobalt-blue and etched with letters in Arabic calligraphy – just as the artist had visualised it in a 2008 sketch, three years before he passed away in London in 2011.
Born in Maharashtra’s Pandharpur in 1915, the famed modernist had called several cities and countries — including Dubai and London — home before he accepted Qatari citizenship in 2010.
The then Indian Ambassador to Qatar, Deepa Gopalan Wadhwa, distinctly remembers the day he arrived at the Indian embassy in Doha to relinquish his Indian passport. “He gave back his passport with a lot of pain and wanted us to immediately start processing papers for an OCI (Overseas Citizenship of India) card, stating, ‘I cannot cut my connections with India’,” recalled Wadhwa.
At the centre of the museum’s collection are the works he produced in Qatar that remain rarely displayed.
Unbound, pioneering and prolific, by this time Husain — who had left India in 2006 on a self-imposed exile, amid vandalism and multiple court cases filed against him for his nude depictions of Hindu gods and goddesses — had already carved out his place in Qatar, and gained a patron in HH Sheikha Moza bint Nasser, chairperson of Qatar Foundation. She also commissioned him a series of 99 paintings inspired by the Arab civilization, of which Husain completed around 35 before his demise. Also the visionary behind the museum, she celebrated Husain and his legacy Thursday at its opening that also drew several Indian artists, including Subodh Gupta, Riyas Komu, auctioneer Dadiba Pundole, film producer and interior designer Gauri Khan and fashion designer Sabyasachi Mukherjee. “More than countries and its identities, this museum means victory of cultures and artists as a carrier,” said Komu.
Reflecting how the museum frames Husain as a truly global artist, Kholoud Al-Ali, executive director of community engagement and programming, Qatar Foundation, said, “This museum is a special addition to Doha’s art and culture scene as it is the first of its kind dedicated to an artist. While Husain was an Indian artist, he was also a Qatari, and this museum represents both.”
While the exhibits documenting his formative years come from Husain’s collection and include works he transported from India after relocating to Qatar, Delhi-based architect Martand Khosla explained how the 2008 sketch acted as the “foundation and the spark” for the architectural vision of the museum. “It felt like Husain had left behind a conversation starter — something that asked for response, invention and collaboration. That sense of entering into a dialogue with him across time remained central to the design process,” he said.
Spanning over 3,000 sq metres, the entire structure is composed of two main volumes — the blue house and the grey house — connected by a cylindrical structure that functions as both a staircase and amphitheatre-like seating. The galleries unfold like chapters tracing Husain’s various engagements, beginning with a space where screens along the walls display archival photographs of the artist and his friends, sketches and a handwritten note written by him to Sheikha Moza bint Nasser, read, “Please consider me a small soldier in the army of your cultural force”.
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Housed in an adjacent building, his final multimedia installation, Seeroo fi al ardh, completed posthumously, is a carousel featuring vintage cars, Murano glass horses and a replica of Leonardo da Vinci’s flying machine.
While an immersive draws visitors into Husain’s world with galloping horses and sweeping landscapes, the museum features more than 150 works, not chronologically curated but commencing with the 1950 Doll’s Wedding. The selection may not be exhaustive but it does bring together some of his many preoccupations and includes portraits of saint and missionary Mother Teresa, India’s first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, Nobel-winning physicist C V Raman and Pakistani philosopher-poet Allama Muhammad Iqbal. If a 1992 series of wooden sculptures is reminiscent of the period he designed toys at a store in Mumbai in the 1940s, the museum also screens his first film Through the Eyes of a Painter.
At the centre of the museum’s collection are the works he produced in Qatar that remain rarely displayed. If the vivid red Last Supper of the Desert (2008) presents an Arabic lens on Leonardo da Vinci’s iconic masterpiece, in Battle of Badr (2008) Husain paints his trademark angular and fractured horses. Yemen, from the Arab civilization series, is dedicated to his ancestral homeland, from where Suleimani Muslims sailed to west India.
Housed in an adjacent building, his final multimedia installation, Seeroo fi al ardh, completed posthumously, is a carousel featuring vintage cars, Murano glass horses and a replica of Leonardo da Vinci’s flying machine. Intended to trace the progress of humanity by Husain, it attempts to reflect his enduring explorations and the different lives he led across continents, witness to which are his Indian passports encased in glass at the museum.
In India, meanwhile, Wadhwa — whose friendship with Husain began after that pivotal day — treasures a canvas he painted spontaneously at her husband Anil Wadhwa’s (then Indian Ambassador to Oman) residence in Muscat on a day he received a favourable judgment in his court cases: it has his name painted in the colours of the Indian flag in Hindi, English and Urdu.