Asia Society Museum presents Lightning, a mural-sized painting by M.F. Husain, a founding member of the Bombay Progressive Artists Group. Created during a tumultuous period of India’s history, this rarely-seen work was made on the occasion of Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi’s 1975 Congress Party rally in Bombay (Mumbai). That same year, Prime Minister Gandhi imposed a State of Emergency across India in response to what she perceived as a state of dangerous instability in the country.
The bold, graphic style of the work suggests that Husain drew upon his experience as a former professional movie billboard painter to create Lightning’s twelve massive panels. These panels, which are each ten feet high and five feet wide, feature much of the visual iconography that defined Husain’s attempts to depict the complexity and richness of a new India.
Lightning is filled with visual references to India in the 1970s and allusions to Indira Gandhi, though she is absent visually. Against a background of green, red, blue, and purple, white horses outlined in black charge in an energetic and frenetic line toward the left, as if indicating the unstoppable progress of the new nation.
