- Art
- Spring/Summer 2026
- April
A Painter's Dream
Lawh Wa Qalam Museum was first conceived on canvas by the painter MF Husain and later designed by the architect Martand Khosla, who transformed the Indian artist’s vision into a thrilling evocation of his remarkable art and life
Words Radhika Iyengar
Photography Iwan Baan
- Art
- Spring/Summer 2026
- April 2026
A Painter's Dream
Lawh Wa Qalam Museum was first conceived on canvas by the painter MF Husain and later designed by the architect Martand Khosla, who transformed the Indian artist’s vision into a thrilling evocation
Words Radhika Iyengar
Photography Iwan Baan
In Doha's Education City a striking new building has announced itself – Lawh Wa Qalam is the world’s first museum dedicated to the Indian modernist painter Maqbool Fida Husain. Yet almost two decades before the museum took shape as a building it already existed as an idea on canvas.
Painted just three years before he died in 2011, Husain’s vision for the museum was remarkably close to its built form – a series of blue blocks set beside a white cylindrical tower. In the sketch the structures rise from a landscape of green patches and golden sand, with the Persian Gulf suggested in the distance. Husain shared the artwork with Her Highness Sheikha Moza bint Nasser, chairperson of the Qatar Foundation, offering her the vision of a “painter’s museum”. Along the sketch’s slender border he scrawled a note: “I present for a kind glance of Her Highness, a concept of Art Complex, my dream to educate and entertain.” In November 2025 Sheikha Moza realised the late artist’s dream at the opening ceremony of Lawh Wa Qalam: M. F. Husain Museum.
The completed Lawh Wa Qalam Museum (“the tablet and the pen” in Arabic) traces the trajectory of Husain’s career, which was defined by flourishes of drama. Never one to shy away from making controversial political or religious statements through his art, he rose to fame in India for the same reasons that later drew threats from right-wing Hindu nationalist groups, prompting him to leave the country. From 2006, he lived in the United Kingdom and the United Arab Emirates before finally settling in Doha. In 2010 Husain was given Qatari citizenship, a year before his death at the age of 95.
The 3,000-square-metre museum houses 150 artworks by Husain – whose signature look of Hermès suits and bare feet was perhaps just as recognised as his work. The collection, which includes works created from 1950 to 2011, is eclectic, expansive and inimitable: from large-scale paintings to tapestries, films and wooden sculptures. Among them is a constellation of 35 paintings belonging to the Arab Civilisation series, commissioned by Sheikha Moza and produced by Husain towards the end of his life, reflecting a deeply personal exploration of his Yemeni ancestry.
Designed by Indian architect Martand Khosla, the museum, which took three-and-a-half years to complete, was carefully constructed to resemble the sketch Husain made years earlier. When Khosla first encountered that sketch, certain elements leapt out immediately: the striking azure tiles inspired by Central Asia, the towering earthen-brown buildings that echo those found in Yemen, sunlit desert canopies gently billowing and a tall, periscope-like form that evokes the shape of a pen.
“The sketch was a point from which architecture emerged”
“When you begin to decode a work of art with experts, you start to understand the larger worldview of the artist,” says Khosla. Rather than reading Husain’s artwork as a literal blueprint for the museum, the design process focused on interpreting it symbolically, drawing out its metaphorical elements and understanding how these references were not moored to a single geography or cultural identity. This approach revealed Husain’s expansive vision – one that extended well beyond India to encompass Asia and North Africa.
This global sensibility is immediately visible in the “blue house”, as the main block of the museum is known. The facade is wrapped in a vivid mosaic of patterned tiles that gleam in the sun, taking cues from two architectural spaces in India closely associated with Husain: the New Delhi home that Husain designed for art collector and gallerist Renu Modi in 1986, and the Amdavad ni Gufa in Ahmedabad. The latter is an underground gallery created by Pritzker Prize-winning architect BV Doshi in collaboration with Husain.
Martand Khosla
Indian architect Martand Khosla leads Romi Khosla Design Studios, an award-winning practice based in New Delhi, India, where questions of form, labour and the city’s changing skyline have long informed his work. He approaches a site not merely as a location, but as a repository of lived experiences, reflecting on the responsibilities architects bear both as authors of – and witnesses to – the process of city-making.
Khosla trained as an architect at the Architectural Association in London but is equally engaged as an artist. His creative practice is dynamic and moves fluidly between architectural structures and large-scale sculptural works, using each discipline to examine how cities and urban landscapes are made, and how they function for those who inhabit them and move through them. “Art allows me to reflect on cities from a broader perspective, while architecture draws me into the details – how form, light and spatial relationships influence the way people inhabit a space and experience it,” Khosla explains.
Khosla’s art has been exhibited at galleries, including Nature Morte in New Delhi, and is part of collections at the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art (India), Devi Art Foundation (India), Stiftung Kuntsdepot (Switzerland) and Benaki Museum (Athens) – reinforcing the instinctive dialogue that exists between art and his design practice. Before he designed Lawh Wa Qalam: M. F. Husain Museum, he created the M. F. Husain Art Gallery at Jamia Millia Islamia University, New Delhi. These works showcase how his architectural vision and artistic sensibilities converge to create spaces that engage and educate.
“The Amdavad ni Gufa incorporates broken tiles as part of its surface, while the Modi house has this idea of a line that runs through the building as a kind of narrative,” explains Khosla. “It doesn’t use tiles, but it employs large stones in a similar way.”
Entering the museum feels almost theatrical. Visitors pass through a sharply arched doorway – a nod to Husain’s original sketch – fitted with automatic sliding brass doors that briefly flood light into a darkened gallery. Inside this first gallery, Husain appears immediately – not in portraits but in video works and moving images.
The drama of light continues into the building’s centre, where a curvilinear glass shell encloses the atrium, anchored by a staircase that, as Khosla puts it, “holds the museum together”. At ground level the museum looks out onto Seeroo fi al ardh, 2022, which translates as “walk in the land” or “travel through the earth” – a large-scale kinetic multimedia installation housed within a separate glass pavilion. The immersive work comprises a 20-minute performance that combines movement, sculpture, sound and light – and includes life-size crystal horses and vintage cars rising up out of a rotating “carousel” – to trace a poetic narrative of human progress. Conceived by Husain in 2009 and realised after his death, it is widely regarded as the artist’s final masterpiece.
Ascending the museum’s central stairs, the view opens out onto the sun-drenched skyline of Education City, which encompasses institutions such as the Qatar National Library, Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art and the Hamad Bin Khalifa University, among other landmarks. In this way, Khosla suggests, the central atrium and staircase do more than connect floors: they anchor the museum within a larger urban landscape. “It’s not just physically or architecturally but metaphorically as well,” explains Khosla. “It is a place of learning, inquiry and debate.”
“This gallery is about the making of MF Husain and who he was…"
Although Lawh Wa Qalam mirrors Husain’s vision closely, the path to the final design of the museum was far from linear. Three drafts were developed, each undergoing multiple iterations, as the team worked on transforming a two-dimensional artwork into a structure that remained faithful to Husain’s imagination. In the original sketch the artist had annotated his vision for an “art and cinema museum”. According to these notes the “blue house” would house his paintings and sculptures; the “white column” would feature photography and graphic works, and there would be a library, cinema, performance area and a space for children to make art – all features that have been incorporated.
“The sketch served as a springboard,” says Khosla. “It gave us a set of tools – a point from which an architecture could begin to emerge.”
The site for Lawh Wa Qalam, however, had to be adjacent to the glass pavilion that houses Seeroo fi al ardh, a condition that introduced its own complexities. “The site was very convoluted,” recalls Khosla. “It had to maintain a certain distance from Seeroo fi al ardh, and there were bylaws to consider. Issues of insulation, lighting and materiality also came into play. But this is just what architects do.”
The museum maps the many phases of Husain’s prolific career, illustrated with archival portraits of him – walking barefoot in bustling bazaars or looking pensively beyond the frame – taken by renowned photographers such as Steve McCurry and Parthiv Shah.
Among Lawh Wa Qalam’s most significant holdings is Untitled (Doll’s Wedding), believed to have been painted in 1950. “It’s our oldest piece,” says Noof Mohammed, the museum’s curator. The painting depicts a jubilant wedding in India, drawing on the visual language of folk traditions. With bold and earthy colours set against a yellowish-red background, the figures appear deliberately fragmented. “This gallery is really about the making of MF Husain and who he was – both as an artist and a storyteller,” says Mohammed.
Born in Pandharpur, Maharashtra, in 1915 (some records suggest 1913), Husain was largely self-taught, spending years perfecting his craft outside formal institutions. The son of an accountant, he moved to Bombay (now Mumbai) in 1937, sleeping on the streets and earning a living painting cinema posters and billboards before committing to life as an artist.
Over the decades, Husain developed versatility across several media. In addition to painting, he was a toy-maker and photographer. In 1967 his debut short film, Through the Eyes of a Painter, won the Golden Bear award at the Berlin International Film Festival, and it can also be seen at the museum.
He had an untamed restlessness and a deep need to always create. He could often be seen sauntering through markets looking for inspiration, wielding a slender paintbrush. “He probably wanted to show how his art and life were inseparable,” says Amita Shenoy, the museum’s curatorial consultant. “Husain never stepped in and out of being an artist, he lived it continuously.”
Husain repeatedly used art to record pivotal moments in India’s history. Quit India Movement, 1985, is a large-scale painting animated by the stark black outlines of the figures portrayed. The composition records the call by Mahatma Gandhi in 1942 for a campaign of civil disobedience, with the aim of ending British colonial rule.
"Husain never stepped in and out of being an artist, he lived it continuously.”
Also on view is Mother Teresa, 1998, a triptych depicting faceless female silhouettes often read as invocations of the Catholic nun. The women cradle an unclothed, emaciated figure. It’s a painting charged with poignancy, gesturing toward themes of care, loss and maternal absence that recur across Husain’s work. “Most of the women Husain painted are faceless,” explains Mohammed. “He lost his mother when he was one-and-a-half years old and he couldn’t remember her face. In a way, this is a tribute to his own mother as well as Mother Teresa.”
The exhibition also features glass vitrines displaying some of Husain’s personal belongings: his spectacles, leather-bound notebooks and a pair of passports – a deep-blue Indian one and the burgundy Qatari one he was granted after painfully relinquishing his Indian citizenship in 2010.
After receiving a deluge of death threats from right-wing Hindu groups for controversial works that depicted nude Indian goddesses, Husain left India in 2006 never to return. Doha emerged as a place of refuge following an invitation from Sheikha Moza. There, he “swiftly rediscovered his sense of belonging by returning to his Arab roots”, she recalled in her speech at the inauguration of Lawh Wa Qalam.
“When you begin to decode a work of art… you start to understand the larger worldview of the artist.”
The relationship between the artist and Sheikha Moza deepened, becoming a cherished friendship that soon translated into patronage. She invited him to undertake an expansive commission – an ambitious body of work tracing the cultural and historical sweep of Arab civilisation. This led him to visit Yemen with her, where he explored the country's mountains and places like Souq al-Milh, a thriving market in the Yemeni capital Sanaa. En route back to Qatar he sketched the sights that had left him spellbound.
Among the paintings in the resulting Arab Civilisation series is The Battle of Badr, 2008, which depicts galloping horses, their multi-hued manes caught in motion. The painting reflects a riveting historical moment: the Islamic victory of 624 CE against the larger Quraysh army of Mecca. Another painting, Yemen, 2008, is a visual montage, offering vignettes of a country always in motion. There are minarets and mud buildings, date palms, motorcycles and cars juxtaposed with camels and caravans. It’s a work that gestures at Husain’s exploration of his Arab heritage. Today, he is frequently understood as a bridge figure, an artist whose identity straddles both India and Western Asia.
“What left me speechless was that Husain painted the Arab Civilisation series in his 90s,” says Shenoy. “The sheer scale of thought and energy behind those works was extraordinary. His hunger for creative expression never diminished with age. If anything, it seemed to intensify. I’m reminded of the time I visited him in London. He had injured his right hand, yet he did not pause and continued to paint using his left.”
For an artist who spent his final years in exile, Lawh Wa Qalam restores a sense of belonging – not bound by a nation but by imagination. The museum stands as a reminder that Husain’s art transcended borders, and that he was shaped by an unrelenting faith in creation.
Artworks
1. Yemen, 2008
Although he was known as “The Picasso of India”, Husain also celebrated his Yemeni heritage – particularly in his later exile years. This work was created following a trip to Yemen with Sheikha Moza.
2. The Battle of Badr, 2008
This work depicts the pivotal 624CE battle in which 313 Muslims defeated 1,000 Quraysh soldiers, with the artist’s signature horses evoking the chaos of battle.
3. Mother Teresa, 1998
Husain portrayed Mother Teresa in a series of paintings starting around 1980, focused on themes of motherhood. He often depicted her without a face in reference to the loss of his own mother as an infant.
Cover image: The broken blue tiles used to clad part of the museum are a reference to previous works by MF Husain, including a home in New Delhi and the Husain Doshi ni-Gufa in Ahmedabad. Photo: Iwan Baan
