With Friday's opening of Lawh Wa Qalam: MF Husain Museum in Doha, Qatar becomes home to a global first – a museum dedicated to Maqbool Fida Husain, one of the most influential and controversial modernist artists of the 20th century.
This new space marks the rare convergence of art, architecture, memory and reinvention for a region whose cultural ambitions have steadily grown over the past decade. The opening also marks Husain’s final homecoming.
Set within Education City under the aegis of Qatar Foundation, Lawh Wa Qalam (which translates as “tablet and pen”) is a 3,000-square metre museum that showcases Husain’s fluid, multidisciplinary creativity. The design is based on a sketch by the artist – a museum he imagined, but never lived to see.
Inside, more than 35 works from the artist's prolific final decade are on permanent display, including the monumental Arab Civilisation series commissioned by Sheikha Moza bint Nasser, mother of Emir of Qatar Sheikh Tamim, as well as Husain's last multimedia installation Seeroo Fi Al-Ardh (Journey on Earth). Together, they showcase the artist’s last act: restless, expansive and deeply engaged with Arab cultural and historical motifs.
The museum’s official opening on November 28 was a milestone not only for Qatar, but also for the wider Gulf, which has been steadily positioning itself as a global centre for the arts.
Creative refuge
Husain’s long relationship with Doha was shaped by circumstance and curiosity. After threats and legal challenges in India over his depictions of Hindu deities, he left the country in 2006. Four years later, he accepted Qatari citizenship. He died in London in 2011 at the age of 95.
Husain's final decade was spent largely painting in Doha and became a period of renewed artistic freedom. The vast canvases, sweeping lines and mytho-historical references that emerged from this period were shaped by a city that the artist seemingly found open and generative.
“MF Husain was one of the most prolific and imaginative artists of the modern era,” says Kholoud Al-Ali, executive director of community engagement and programming at Qatar Foundation. To her, a dedicated museum “felt like a natural and necessary step”, not least because some of Husain's most ambitious works were created in Doha. Seeroo Fi Al-Ardh and the Arab Civilisation series, she notes, “are not just chapters of his career; they also reflect a remarkable period of his illustrious life”.
By placing these works in a museum Husain himself envisioned, Qatar Foundation hopes to honour that story “with the depth and coherence it deserves”, preserving a body of work that belongs simultaneously to regional and global art history. The intention is not for a static institution, but a dynamic one, a place “where painting meets film, storytelling blends with design, and visitors can follow his ideas as they unfold”.
Educational ecosystem
The decision to situate Lawh Wa Qalam in Education City reflects Qatar Foundation’s larger vision: that art is integral to learning, inquiry and civic life.
“Education City has evolved into a space where disciplines intersect naturally,” says Al-Ali, an ecosystem where research, heritage, innovation and public art are placed in active conversation.
Husain’s own practice, with its movement between painting, film, photography and design, “aligns closely with this ambition”. Al-Ali explains that the museum is conceived as the first dedicated cultural institution inside Education City, ensuring that art is not cordoned off as an elite pursuit, but positioned at the centre of everyday life.
In its first year, Lawh Wa Qalam will emphasise motion and multiplicity. Alongside its permanent galleries, the museum will offer rotating displays exploring Husain’s cinematic interests, his dual engagement with South Asian and Arab aesthetics, and the geometry and spiritual themes that pulse through his work. Workshops, screenings, family programmes, school outreach and university collaborations will form a core part of its programming.
“We hope that Lawh Wa Qalam becomes a cultural hub,” says Al-Ali, a place where people of all ages come “to learn, create, or be inspired”.
Translating sketch into architecture
While the museum preserves Husain’s artistic legacy, its architecture realises his vision in built form. The design, by Indian architect Martand Khosla, began not with a site plan or blueprint but with Husain’s original sketch, a drawing Khosla describes as operating “at several levels – the literal, the symbolic and the metaphorical”.
Unpacking that sketch became the conceptual starting point. “Husain’s drawing is not anchored to a particular site or scale,” Khosla tells The National. Instead, it offered “a formal direction, a set of cultural cues and a philosophical intent for what a museum should aspire to be”. The challenge lay in transforming that into an architecture capable of holding contemporary museum programmes.
Central to the sketch was a blue mosaic facade – the “blue house” – from which the rest of the building evolved. Its interplay of blue and grey masses, alternating between contemplative, inward-looking and open-plan, outward-looking spaces draw both from Husain’s visual vocabulary and from the larger Modernist movement of the Indian subcontinent, of which he was a key figure.
Balancing contemporary form with regional connection was essential. The museum sits on a raised platform “almost like a stage”, says Khosla, and invites engagement. Its cylindrical volume, bridging the blue and grey houses, echoes the language of Seeroo Fi Al-Ardh next door, linking the museum visually and conceptually with Husain’s final commission.
Khosla also references “Indian urbanism and its memories” via the dense massing and suggestion of streetscapes.
Journey of discovery
For Khosla, the intended visitor experience mirrors Husain’s nomadic, inquisitive movement through ideas and cities. The architecture avoids a linear sequence. Instead, it encourages wandering.
“I hope visitors experience a sense of discovery,” he says, not only of Husain’s work, but “of the many worlds that shaped him”.
From the introductory gallery, pathways open in multiple directions, offering elevated views, pauses and points of reflection. A central tower acts as a “cinematic periscope”, extending the museum’s sightlines across the region and echoing the cross-cultural exchanges that defined Husain’s career. The objective is to create an experience that seems intimate and expansive at the same time.
Husain’s story spanned Mumbai, London, Dubai, Doha and more, and is deeply connected to the transnational flow that defines the contemporary Gulf. With Lawh Wa Qalam, Doha is not simply inaugurating another cultural institution; it is staking a claim in shaping modern art histories that transcend borders.
The artist once described himself as a wanderer, a nomad with a brush. At Lawh Wa Qalam in Doha, that restless movement seems to have found a permanent resting place.
