Maqbool Fida Husain, India’s Most Famous Painter, Dies at 95

THE NEW YORK TIMES
By William Grimes

Maqbool Fida Husain stands before his “Last Supper” in 2004.

UNITED KINGDOM - Maqbool Fida Husain, an artist whose modernist reinterpretations of mythic and religious subjects made him India’s most famous painter and, in recent years, a target of right-wing Hindu groups, died on Thursday in London. He was 95.

Indifferent to both religion and politics, Mr. Husain, a Muslim by upbringing, treated the gods and goddesses of Hinduism as visual stimuli rather than deities, depicting them unclothed and often in sexually suggestive poses. This cavalier treatment earned him the bitter hatred of Hindu nationalist groups, which beginning in the 1990s mounted a campaign of intimidation and violence against him. [link]