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| 01/07/1991 |
| REVIEW OF IJAZ UL HASSAN'S PAINTING IN PAKISTAN |
Review of ‘Painting in Pakistan’ by Ijaz ul Hassan (1991). Printed in LIBAS, Vol.4 (1991).
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| PART 1 [Printed in LIBAS, Vol.4 (1991).] |
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| To open the cover of Ijaz ul Hassan’s survey of Painting in Pakistan is to gain admittance into the only National Gallery of Pakistan. Nowhere in Pakistan – not in any of galleries managed by the public-funded Arts Councils in Karachi and Lahore nor in the Islamabad Pakistan National Councils of the Arts, certainly not in any of the corporate or private caches of pictures – can one expect t see such an array of paintings and other works of arts that might quality for a national collection. |
| In compiling this stunning collage of the work of 100 artists associated with art in Pakistan since independence, Ijaz ul Hassan has sensibly taken an apolitical course. He has included the work of Bengali artists from the fertile fragment of the country that before 1971 was East Pakistan: he has reproduced two comparatively unknown paintings by the Hungarian-Sikh but essentially Punjabi painter Amrita Sher Gil, and he has not shied away as many official art-historians do from tracing the different colourful skeins visible in Pakistani painting today back to the twists of a pre-1947 heritage. |
| The credit for this gallantry does not belong entirely to Ijaz. To an extent it has been thrust upon him by successive administrations which have over the years gradually passed the burden of patronage – whether to sponsoring or collecting art or of writing or publishing books on it – from the State to the individual. It is not accidental that out of the 70 or so owners from whose collections the illustrations of this book originate, more than half are private individuals. |
| To look for anything one the same subject and even partially comparable to this important research work, one needs to rummage through the fifties and the sixties, to retrieve that earlier publication on Art in Pakistan, written by the doyen of bureaucrats in art-critic’s clothing. Mr. Jalauddin Ahmed, and brought out in 1954 by Pakistan Publications. This work was subsequently updated by Mr. Ahmed, drawing upon an intermediate publication of his – Contemporary Painters of Pakistan, published by the Arts Council in 1958 and reissued in a revised and enlarged edition in 1962. Most of the other reference material since then has been more ephemeral, appearing and subsiding in newspaper articles or weekend supplements or contained in exhibition catalogue notes. Anyone wanting to possess a permanent record of the history and development of painting in Pakistan has had to wait until Ijaz Ul Hassan, a student at Aitcheson College when Jalauddin Ahmed’s book was first issued and still an unformed undergraduate at Cambridge when it was reissued. Temporarily put down his brush (for he is now a prominent painter in his own right) and took up his pen on behalf of his fraternity. |
| He was invited to do so, he mentions in the preface to Painting in Pakistan, over twenty-three years ago in 1968 by Mr. Altaf Gauhar, then Federal information Secretary and perhaps the last of the Renaissance bureaucrats. At the time, Ijaz ul Hassan was the professor of Academics at the Lahore’s Premier National College of Arts. The NCA was under the light coaxing control of Professor Shakir Ali, a painter of such expansive stature that he could, like the monumental tree that spread its protective branches over the quadrangle of the College, afford to let generations of students grow and graduate from the College, leaving their initials carved on his reputation. |
| Professor Shakir Ali suggested Ijaz’s name as a possible author of the ambitious opus Altaf Gauhar had in mind, and thus began a journey which took Ijaz across the country, across its border to India, across the personal frontiers of each artist’s individual style and inspiration and in the end across a time zone spanning more than two decades. |
| Jalaludin Ahmed’s pioneering introduction to the state of art in Pakistan up to the 1960s had covered the work of sixty painters whom he categorized not according to movements or schools – fifteen years (i.e. 1947 – 1962) is too small a period for this”, he maintained – but according to generations. He stacked them, as shopkeepers do with their cartons of merchandise, with the oldest on top. The elder group of traditional painters – Abdul Rahman Chughtai, Fyzee Rahmain. Ustad Allah Bux and Haji Muhammad Sharif – he regarded as having developed their individual style and produced most of their substantial work before 1947. In the second group – the young elders as he called them – he included Shakir Ali, Zain Ul Abedin, Ali Imam, Safdar, Zubedia Agha, Anna Molka Ahmed, and Gulgee and Khalid Iqbal. His third group – the younger painters and sculptors, mostly in their twenties and thirties, whose work is mostly experimental, but who form the most active and prolific group of artists – Sadequain, who like some artistic Vesuvius, erupted with unexpected force and overshadowed the art scene of Pakistan during the sixties and the seventies with an ashen palette of greys. Sombre overcast blues and charred blacks. Sadequain died in 1987, and of most of the other painters Jalaluddin Ahmed included in this latter category. |
| Raheel Akbar, Hamidur Rahman, Murtaza Bashir, Aminul Islam, M. Kibria and Rashid Chaudhry – few are seriously active or if active in Bangladesh, they can not longer be regarded strictly as Pakistani painters. |
| Their influence though and impact on the youngest generation of Pakistani painters who throng the final pages of Ijaz ul Hassan’s book (as they themselves did Jalaluddin Ahmed’s thirty years ago) is perhaps the most cogent justification Ijaz ul Hassan has for approaching the subject of contemporary art-history from the angle that he has. He has tried to see the subject in the historic continuity and in the context of the various aesthetic, cultural of ideological influences – instrumental in its fruition. His concern has been less with the artist, he admits, than with his work for the ideas and intentions of an artist may largely influence what the artists creates but it is through the work alone that we must judge the artist.’ |
| When there is something which catches Ijaz ul Hassan’s eye and quickens his sensibilities, he is masterful and unequivocal in his appreciation. Writing of another senior artist, he notes “The human figure in Ali Imam has a gentle dignity where strong sentiments and emotions are restrained in his more recent works, he has become particularly sensitive to tone and colour which are exploited with tactful ingenuity. These canvases are covered with thick gritty paste which is applied by a knife. This thick layer of paint is usually cream white or of a light pastel shade, through which subdued images are allowed to emerge. Quite often, the frozen silence of the picture surface is broken by spicy notes of yellow and orange which tease the viewer through the ivory façade. |
| Unlike many painters who tend to be as finite in their dimensions as their canvases. Ijaz ul Hassan has never fell confined by the limitations of his medium or of the surface he works upon. His huge garden-scape entitled let a Hundred Plants Bloom, which has been reproduced across the top of the two pages as colour plate 81, could almost have served as the sub-title of the book itself, so close is it to the approach he has adopted of presenting the works of the various artists whose works he has selected for inclusion. |
| Rather than following the hierarchal structure based upon seniority, as Jalaluddin Ahmed did, Ijaz ul Hassan has preferred to allow his subject artists to mingle and then form their own groupings, as naturally as they might do at one of their own informal gatherings. |
| PART 2 [Printed in LIBAS magazine, Vol.5, 1992.] |
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| After an introductory chapter on the historical development of painting n the sub-continent (which may agitate some of the more serious scholars of miniature painting who will find voice to argue against his assertion of Lahore as the crucible of painting found in the numerous Punjab hill states), a second chapter – Search for Identity – traces the influence of the Art Schools which were established by the British during the 1880’s and the resultant emergence of the Bengal School of painting, the most durable, persistent exponent of which remained, until his death in 1975, the romantic watercolorist AR Chughtai. |
| Of the five painters, mentioned in Chapter 3 as having infused a New Sensibility to local painting. Amrita Sher-Gil and Zubeida Agha (both former student so of the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris) can be readily distinguished from the other three –Anna Molka Ahmed, Zainul Abedin and Shakir Ali. The latter were not only in a class apart (I do not mean they were better or worse, simply different), but as teachers at crucial centres of art education at the Lahore and Dacca. They individually set standards of personal endeavour and artistry that inspired their students to unexpected heights of performance Anna Molka Ahmed, an East Eurpean by origin and temperament but fiercely Pakistani by choice, headed the Fine Arts department of the Punjab University, Lahore. Zainul Abedin became the driving force behind the resurgence of art education in Dacca, having previously achieved fame with his poignant sketches of the 1943 Bengal rice famine, thereby unwittingly making hunger fashionable some thirty years before Bob Geldof did and Shakir Ali, the soft-pawed Principal of the National College of Arts who like the unsmiling King of Thailand who preferred to let his charming consort smile for both of them, remained reticent and chose to let his paintings speak for both of them in Chapter IV—Re awakening in Lahore discusses the work of the traditionalists of Chughtai’s persuasion and of those newer modernists like Moyene Najmi, Ali Imam (who founded an manages the influential Indus Gallery in Karachi), and the late Ahmed Parvez with his almost psychedelic convoluted imagery in defiant contrast to Sheikh Safdar’s ordered allotments of colour. |
| Khalid Iqbal (in the opinion of many Pakistan’s leading landscape painter) taught for many years both at the Punjab University Fine Arts Department and at the National College of Arts Department of Painting. In a way, he has been the most insidious form of teacher for he has taught his students landscape painting not by direction but by example. His themes have been as singular in their focus as his habits have been solitary. Going out early each morning and painting in the quietude of his on company. He has conveyed through his personal vision a perception of th natural harmony of the countryside. After Khalid Iqbal left the Punjab University for the national College across the road, two former students of his Ghulam Rasul and Zulqarnain Haider still at the University Punjab Fine Arts Department would furtively cross the Mall to meet their former teacher. To look at their work placed alongside khalid’s in the book under the chapter Pursuit of the Real is to understand why they felt the risk worth taking. |
| Gradually, with the emergence of newer, younger and more artists on the Pakistan art scene, the book expands like some sort of computer spreadsheet, extending along different paths and in potentially limitless directions. The image of Man reviews the work of portraitists Colin David with his almost anecdotal studies and Saeed Akhtar who could blindfold paints the Quaid-e-Azam (and perhaps sometimes does). Mansoor aye and the summer season specialist Hal Bevan-Petman, who made a comfortable living portraying society ladies who had escaped to the hill station o Murree. They had a choice if green-eyed they were sketched wearing a Hyderabadi emerald choker necklace or if they chanced to dark-eyed, the jewellery and sari were matched accordingly. No society belle could afford not to have been portrayed by Bevan-Petman just as no house in Karachi could be said to have been decorated unless it had a Jamil Naqsh study of one or more Women with one or more Pigeons against a background which complemented the colour of the sofas. So obsessive as been this artist’s preoccupation with this theme over the past twenty years or so that a way recently suggested that there should be a statue erected to Jamil Naqsh, just to enable the long-suffering pigeons to wreak their revenge on him. A portraitist with a restless vision has been Bashir Mirza, a brilliant student at the NCA and a consummate craftsman as a mature artist. One of his Lonely Girl studies gives an idea of his confident uncompromising almost yoga-like command of form and his masterful use of pure colour. |
| In contrast, exponents of non-figurative painting have been Muhammad Kibria, Iqbal Jafree, Zahoor ul Ikhlaque, and certainly the most innovative and exciting of them all-Ismail Gulgee, an engineer-turned-painter-turned mosaicist. He has become a gilded Andy Warhol of the Pakistani art-world, a modern Midas who can touch a canvas and spatter it with gold, a showman whose dexterity and dazzling virtuosity belies a very serious and clear mined understanding of this craft. |
| The concluding chapter of Ijaz ul Hasan’s book is captioned Wind of Change, referring to the 1970s. The names of artists who belong to this period – Mansoora Hasan, Nahid Ali, Qudsia Raza, Wahab Jaffer, Mashkoor Raza, Kohari, Shahid Jalal, Imran Mir, Iqbal Hussain, Ghulam Mustafa, Mohamad Ali, Ghazanfar Ali-are the potential elders of tomorrow it is significant that none of them is a teacher. They represent the product rather than the process, the result rather than the experiment in search of an identity. Many Pakistani painters, Ijaz ul Hassan says, in spite of their borrowed forms, have managed to infuse them with indigenous content, expressive of their individual experience. Their work has a fresh confidence about it, a level of self-expression which displays the essential fulfillment and maturing consummation of the Pakistani artist. |
| Perhaps the greatest strength in Ijaz ul Hassan’s important monograph is not which specific painters he has included or ought not to have included, or what he has said or not said or ought to have said about each. Its greatest utility is to have provided, as any National gallery should, every Pakistani citizen with an opportunity of viewing his won art-heritage and helping him or her to understand the creative output of the nations’ artists and its enriching relevance to their life. Until the National gallery of Pakistan is built Ijaz ul Hassan’s work will serve as a solid monument to the genesis, growth and maturing potential of painting in Pakistan. |
| Printed in LIBAS magazine, Vol.5, 1992. |
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| 01 July 1991 |
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