A new museum dedicated to M. F. Husain, one of India’s most important modernists, will open in Doha, Qatar, next month.
Operated under the aegis of the Qatar Foundation, the new institution, officially called Lawh Wa Qalam: M. F. Husain Museum, will be the first museum dedicated to the artist and will draw from a newly formed permanent collection, which contains works in various mediums by Husain, from paintings and tapestries to photographs and films to installations and poetry.
Opening November 28, the M. F. Husain Museum will provide an overview of Husain’s artistic career, spanning his rise in the 1950s until his death in 2011. The building’s design is based on a 2008 sketch by the artist. Among the works on view will be a series of paintings about Arab civilization commissioned by Sheikha Moza bint Nasser, the chairperson of Qatar Foundation, as well as one of Husain’s final works Seeroo fi al ardh (2009), which will have its own dedicated gallery.
The 32,300-square-foot museum will be located in Doha’s Education City, which was developed by the Qatar Foundation and includes the Qatar outposts of several US universities, including Carnegie Mellon, Georgetown, Northwestern, and Texas A&M.
Born in either 1913 or 1915, Husain is best-known for his blocky, Cubist-inflected paintings. He was a founding member, alongside F. N. Souza and S. H. Raza, of the important Bombay Progressive Artists Group, which a group of artists established in present-day Mumbai in 1947. According to a release, Husain considered himself “a global nomad.” He held Qatari citizenship, settling in the country toward the end of his life.
During his lifetime, Husain was included in some of the day’s most important international art exhibitions, including the 1952 Venice Biennale, the 1960 Tokyo Biennial, and the 1971 Bienal de São Paulo. His work was the subject of a major retrospective at the National Gallery of Modern Art in 1991 and, more recently, at Doha’s Mathaf, Arab Museum of Modern Art in 2019.
In March, Husain’s 1954 painting Untitled (Gram Yatra) sold for $13.8 million at Christie’s New York, marking both a record for the artist and for a work of Indian modern art. Kiran Nadar told ARTnews this summer that she was the buyer of the work, which she said “reflects India’s deep historical roots, its evolving future, and Husain’s dialogue with international modernism as the visual chronicler of post-independence India.”
The first part of the museum’s name, Lawh Wa Qalam, translates to “the Canvas and the Pen.” In an email to ARTnews, Kholoud M. Al-Ali, Qatar Foundation’s executive director of community engagement and programming, said that “Lawh Wa Qalam” are “tools which, in Arabic traditions, represent knowledge, as they record and transmit wisdom, history, and creativity. The choice of this name for the museum reflects how its design was inspired by Maqbool Fida Husain’s own sketch, in which he envisioned the building itself as a work of art, reflecting his lifelong pursuit of experimentation and his practice across multiple disciplines.”
Founded in 1995 by Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani and Sheikha Moza bint Nasser, the Qatar Foundation is a separate entity from the more well-known Qatar Museums, though the two organizations co-own Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art in Doha. The Qatar Foundation’s main areas of philanthropic focus are education, scientific research, and community-building.
In addition to helping bring international universities to Qatar, the foundation also manages the Qatar National Library and the Qatar Philharmonic. It also developed the Msheireb Downtown Doha district, where the inaugural edition of Art Basel Qatar will be staged next February.
Al-Ali added, “By dedicating this museum to Maqbool Fida Husain, and through its name, Qatar Foundation is honoring an artistic career that spanned over half a century, was shaped by diverse cultures, and took inspiration from engagement with the legacies of world religions, civilisations, and influential political and cultural figures throughout history.”
