Doha Opens the First Museum Dedicated to the ‘Picasso of India’

Living and working until the age of 95, Maqbool Fida Husain arrived in Qatar relatively late in his life. Yet it’s here, in Doha, that the first museum dedicated to the “Picasso of India” has opened. Lawh Wa Qalam: M. F. Husain Museum is the latest undertaking of the Qatar Foundation. And while I still wish that a museum devoted to this master’s work might one day stand in India, it makes a lot of sense why this ambitious project found its home here – just as the artist himself did.

For much of the twentieth century M. F. Husain was inseparable from India’s artistic and cultural landscape. Born in Pandharpur in 1915, he came of age amid the churn of a newly independent nation searching for its voice. He painted cinema posters to earn a living, travelled across cities with a bag of brushes, and became a founding member of the Progressive Artists Group, a collective intent on breaking from colonial academic conventions. His canvases depicted village life, city streets, political awakenings and mythological figures with a language that felt both modern and deeply rooted in the everyday.

But the country that shaped him also became the place where he felt increasingly restricted and, ultimately, unsafe. By the late 1990s and early 2000s, rising cultural nationalism seized upon older works in which he had reimagined Hindu deities in a modernist idiom. Protests escalated, exhibitions were vandalised and court cases spread across multiple states. For Husain, it was bewildering to see paintings created decades earlier reframed through a new political lens. While he refused to apologise, the relentless pressure pushed him into self-imposed exile.

In 2006 he left India and in the years that followed, he lived between London, Dubai and Doha. Those close to him recall that this was the period when he began speaking more often about Yemen; he believed his lineage traced back to the region generations earlier. It was in this moment of displacement that Husain reached out to Her Highness Sheikha Moza bint Nasser, an admirer of his work, with a proposal. What evolved was less of a commission and more of an opening into a new life. Qatar was building an ambitious cultural ecosystem, and the Sheikha offered Husain not only patronage but the intellectual freedom and stability he needed to create. The artist went on to accept Qatari citizenship in 2010, just a year before he passed away in London.

Lawh Wa Qalam: M. F. Husain Museum’s Curator, Noof Mohammed, describes the dynamic between the Sheikha and the artist with warmth. “Her Highness was a great admirer of his work, and she invited him to Qatar to honour and support his vision,” she tells me. “He was only able to complete thirty five of the ninety nine paintings he had imagined. Yet even that number carries so much ambition and curiosity.” Doha offered him precisely what he needed: time, safety, and the space to think on a large scale. It became the place where India, the Arab world and the Yemen of his imagination could inhabit the same artistic universe.

At Lawh Wa Qalam, Mohammed and her team have shaped the inaugural exhibition to reveal this breadth of identity. “We wanted everyone to understand who he is, so we started with one of his earliest works, Doll’s Wedding. It was important to show the evolution of his ideas.” The opening gallery presents Husain as a polymath who moved fluidly between tapestry, film and sculpture. “At the same time we show who he is as a narrator of India, of its politics and its people,” she adds. Later rooms turn towards faith, symbolism and finally Qatar, where his sense of belonging took on new meaning. “He really wanted to visit Yemen,” Noof reflects, “and Doha became the place where he could explore that side of himself.”

The story continues through the architecture of the museum, brought to life by New Delhi based architect Martand Khosla. Everything began with a single sketch Husain left behind. “The sketch became the springboard from where I had to develop an architectural language for the museum,” Khosla explains. “It does not identify a particular site, nor does it give any sense of scale. The challenge was to start with the elements in the sketch, decipher them, and then evolve a building that could hold a contemporary museum programme.”

He describes the process as both analytical and imaginative. “We maintained the blue house from the sketch, and from there developed the brown and grey houses along with the central atrium that connects them. The site is linear, so the volumes had to shift and sit in relation to one another in a way that felt both intuitive and grounded in Husain’s language.” The architecture, he emphasises, is not literal. “We were constantly referencing ideas in the sketch on a symbolic level. The arches, for instance, speak to regions from Central Asia to North Africa and of course West Asia and South Asia. There are references to tents, to Yemen, and the massing brings in a reading of South Asian urbanism.”

Khosla sees the building as a vessel for Husain’s worldview. “It had to embody multiculturalism, syncretism and centuries old connections between these regions. Museums today must also be spaces of learning, debate and enquiry, not just containers of artworks. So the architecture had to respond to that contemporary reality.” Khosla reveals his favourite space is the central atrium. “For me it is the heart of the building. The curved glass acknowledges the architecture of Seeroo fi al Ardh. It connects all the major galleries and spaces, and as you ascend the staircase you see the Doha skyline. It is where the museum connects to the city.”

Anticipation hung palpably in the air as guests arrived at the museum’s inauguration gala on 27 November 2025. The event was attended by Husain’s admirers and collectors, including various royals, steel magnate Lakshmi Mittal, Bollywood producer Gauri Khan, artist Subodh Gupta, and fashion designer Sabyasachi Mukherjee. Lawh Wa Qalam’s opening night began with a projection that swept across its tiled facade, telling the story of the artist’s life from India to Qatar through animation and sound. The multimedia spectacle was followed by a speech given by HH Sheikha Moza bint Nasser in which she described Husain as “a true master whose artistic works transcend borders and connect cultures, histories, and identities.”

During dinner, served inside Seeroo fi al Ardh, the artist’s last major work, the mood shifted to something more philosophical. The immersive installation’s slow, deliberate choreography, with Murano glass horses rising into view and vintage cars circling beneath Abbas ibn Firnas, created a sense of continuous progression rather than grand finale – a reminder than change is the only constant in life. Though Husain didn’t live to see this work completed, Qatar Foundation carried his plans forward based on a detailed drawing and copious notes. Much like the posthumous execution of this installation, Lawh Wa Qalam reads not as a nostalgic final chapter, but as an ode to an artist whose dialogue with the world continues even in absence.



Feature image: Maqbool Fida Husain, Battle of Badr, 2008. Courtesy of Qatar Foundation. © Qatar Foundation