A Bombay businessman has commissioned Indian painter Maqbool Fida Husain to create 100 paintings for $21M (Rs. 1 billion).
The buyer, Guru Swarup Srivasava, is described as a low-profile Bombay (Mumbai) businessman who was not an art collector. He says he believes it is a good investment.
What’s Husain doing with the money? He’s going to Bollyland!
Husain plans to splash a major portion of his fee – $20m – on a mega Bollywood film. “I will… cast all the big names in the industry – Amitabh Bachchan, Shah Rukh Khan, everyone,” he said.
Unless dissuaded by saner men, Husain would blow double the budget of Devdas, India’s most expensive film ever.
Here are a few of Husain’s highly stylized paintings.
Good for him.. MF husain is unique. He walks barefoot without shoes or chappal all the time and is famous as modern painter in india. He made two movie “gajagamini” and “meenaxi” directing the movie from a painter’s point of view. I saw gajagamini with madhuri as the lead and its unique…its as if u are transitioning from one painting into another as the movie moves from scene to scene…individual scenes are like huge paintings or moving landscapes with painted characters floating through.. The movie is a women oriented movie projecting women’s lives in ancient times to modern times, with the same female lead meeting da vinci, kalidas, modern man et., at different time periods..worth watching. He stopped screening his second movie meenaxi and stopped release of the dvd for reasons I cannot remember.. Though his paintings are beyond me just like van gogh and gaugin or picasso’s modern paintings, I would love to read his autobiography if he wrote one which I think he did sometime back though Iam not sure.. interesting person.. I loved reading biographies of gogh and gaugin and a couple of other painters (lust for life, moon and six pence, agony and ecstasy). Painters have really unique biographies, most great painters struggled a lot in their lives and at the end of their lives almost went mad though they are exceptons like da vinci and others.. here is the links of reviews of his movies (one review by pritish nandy too) http://in.rediff.com/news/2000/dec/16nandy.htm http://www.rediff.com/entertai/1999/feb/02hus.htm http://in.rediff.com/movies/2004/apr/01meenaxi.htm