| Ijaz ul Hassan’s book was not written in haste; it should not therefore be read in a hurry. It is not that kind of book. |
| It is in fact more of a reference work about the work of artists whose names have become over the years household names to us – Chughtai, Shakir Ali, Sadequain, Bashir Mirza, Gulgee, etc. Readers expecting a racy account of the lives and loves of our artists should be cautioned to look elsewhere. They will find no vignettes here of the peccadilloes of the artists – their lives have been evenly prosaic. They will find no side-long references to the love life to our artists either – they are by instinct and habit monogamous species, changing their styles and spots perhaps but never their wives. (The only artist I knew who married for a second time soon lost her to her first husband). |
| If one was to search for a single quality about Ijaz ul Hassan’s work on his contemporaries and fellow-painters, it would be the impartial seriousness with which he has approached his subject. And for Ijaz, formerly a Professor of Academics at the National College of Arts and now a practicing painter of international repute, painting is a serious business and should be regarded as such. |
| Many years ago, though, as far back as 1968 when he was younger and more daring, he though differently. Had he been as serious then and as worldy-wise, he might not have rushed to accept the invitation of Mr. Altaf Gauhar (at the time Secretary Information) to compile a survey of art on Pakistan. It was an ambitious assignment and one that propelled Ijaz ul Hasan, like some time-voyager, backward into time into the history of past influences that have shaped our present art-scene, and then forward into the future in search of meteoric new artists. |
| All first-time authors have to endure a rather arduous soul-testing pilgrimage in search of a publisher. As Cardinal Wolsey lamented about King Henry VIII after is final rejection by the monarch: “Had I but served God as diligently as I had served the King…”, so is every author tempted to regret that first rash promise, that first step in an impetuous, fervid, ultimately one-sided affair. Governments, like feudal monarchs, can be notoriously whimsical and arbitrary. They commission books and then neglect to publish them; they encourage art and then withhold patronage. They read and return manuscripts but neglect to send back the precious slides and transparencies which were to be used for illustrations. One understands this all too well and therefore sympathies with Ijaz when one reads his disclosure that it has taken him over twenty-three years since that first but in the end sterile official encouragement to have his book published – twenty-three slow years for the chrysalis of his manuscript to emerge as the colourful butterfly we now behold. The satisfaction he must feel is something he must find difficult to express. |
| Painters in Pakistan are fortunate to have had an artist of Ijaz ul Hassan’s stature and academic background as their chronicler. Pakistan has almost as many art-critics as it has painters. Therefore, the responsibility inherent in such an onerous assignment required an experienced had which could present the artists and their works in a coherent though not necessarily chronological order. |
| The definition of painting according to schools or styles or painters has bedeviled recent investigations in art-history. While the fortunes of patrons have gone up and down, the movement of artists has been lateral, usually the result of a migration in search of work for a newer affluent patron. To that extent, the traditional classification of artists according to style has been found to be not necessarily defensible, and even less valid when dealing with peripatetic modern painters. Ijaz ul Hassan has used a looser grouping which makes coherent sense of the works he discusses and enables any future consideration of the work of artists who have yet to come to fall into convenient slots. |
| The first part of the books discusses the development of painting styles in the sub-continent. It is the driest part of his work but that is the necessary unavoidable preparation, rather like the assembly of dry ingredients before coking, for the courses that follow, He summarizes the features of the different aspects of early painting in the sub-continent – at Ajanta and Ellora, the Jaina, Buddhist, Pala and pre-Mughal Sultanate styles – and then elaborates on the more forceful of the influences in our art-history – the Mughal, the Pahari-Sikh and latterly the British. |
| The second and major portion discusses the work of each 100 painters and provides biographical thumb-nail sketches about each. Leafing through the book one comes across old stalwart favorites such as Chughtai and Shakir Ali and Sadequain whose names, now that they are dead, evoke a stronger image in the minds of the public than their paintings do. One meets forgotten friends – Moyene Najmi, Shemza, Ahmed Pervez, Safdar and Raheel Akbar – whose works provided a vibrant impetus to the painting in Pakistan during the 1960s; portraitists like Bashir Mirza, Saeed Akhtar and the undervalued Colin David; landscape artists following a Pied Piper of a Khalid Iqbal into the Punjab countryside; and the numerous abstract specialists who manage often to say the same thing but in different voices. |
| The book, though, belongs less to these established artists than to the newer generation of young artists whose work has been given encouraging prominence in its concluding pages. It is o them that the future of painting in Pakistan really belongs. Today, artists no longer need to migrate. They have burrowed deep roots wherever they are. Artists like Jamil Naqsh or Gulgee or Ali Imam or Mansoor Rahi being irretrievably to Karachi just as Zahoor ul Ikhlaque or Zulqarnain Haider or Saeed Akhtar are associated almost exclusively with Lahore, or in the case of Ghulam Rasul with Islamabad. Pakistani artists do not need to travel or even migrate to obtain recognition. It is proffered to them more or less at their very doorsteps. |
| What do travel nowadays, and should far more increasingly in the future, are their paintings and their reputation. Exhibitions of their works tend to be held only in Karachi, Lahore and Islamabad. Tat is all very well but the next stop after these should not instinctively be New York, London or Tokyo. There is a large over-populated tract known as the rest of Pakistan which deserves to be encouraged to understand contemporary art. If Pakistani paintings to survive and to progress, it will do so only when the irrepressible talent of its painters is mirrored, through regular and frequent exhibitions, by an appreciative response from a wider public which at the moment happens to live outside the municipal limits of our provincial capitals. It is for this reason, as much as for many others, that Mr. Ijaz ul Hassan’s book deserves to be displayed, seen and read throughout the country – in libraries and in homes, in places like Multan and Bahawalpur, Sukkur and Faisalabad, Peshawar and Hyderabad, Quetta and Khairpur, and anywhere else where modern paintings have not yet permeated on any significant scale. His volume can serve as a perfect portable exhibition of Painting in Pakistan. |
Printed in THE FRIDAY TIMES, 31 Jan.-6 Feb., 1991. |
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