"Paintings are like falling in love," he says. And then he says what Bachchawat is probably hoping he would say. "I give credit to Emami for selling in a very difficult market. It's all because of Vikram's personal relationships with his clients, which he's developed" - you can hear him chortle all the way from Dubai - "with ladies from big families."
There’s no one who understands money better than Husain. India’s most well-known and equally prolific artist, says K Bikram Singh, civil servant, filmmaker, columnist, and now the author of a doorstopper book on Husain (called, unimaginatively, Maqbool Fida Husain) has always cultivated rich men. "Money for him is a measure of success," he points out.
We're having coffee at the India International Centre in New Delhi, only yards away from its bar where he broached the subject of a film with Husain. The artist was agreeable, but in the meanwhile lumpen political elements made capital of a Husain painting that purported to be a 'nude' study of "Bharat Mata", and Husain was forced to flee the country for his own safety. "But exile has accentuated that vulnerability," says Bikram Singh.
It's certainly true that Husain has never been far removed from the media. He's courted it as assiduously as he's mocked critics, once famously having a show in Bombay the sum and substance of which was torn, crumpled sheets of newspaper strewn across the gallery floor. Because he was Husain, and even though installation had not yet become a part of art vocabulary, he got away with it, as he got away with most other things - walking barefoot into board rooms to sell his paintings to corporate India at prices that were always astronomical. He was always meant to be evangelical in his white beard and crumpled kurta. Even now, no one has come out openly to ask what the hell he was doing when he said he was making movies - very bad movies - that some still say have artistic merit.
Image: In this photo taken on April 6, 2004, M F Husain poses with actress Tabu during a press conference in Kolkata at the launch of a Hindi film.
Photograph: Deshakalyan Chowdhury/AFP/Getty Images
Also read: Read our interview with M F Husain
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