The legal maxim that wives are not allowed to bear witness for or against their husbands is fortunately not applicable to art-historians. Otherwise, we would have been denied a work of enviable scholarship by Dr Musarrat Hasan. Her latest book happens to be about her husband and is titled: Ijaz ul Hassan: Five Decades of Paintings, published by the Lahore Art Gallery.  

Ever since Dr Musarrat put aside her brush and took up her pen, she has written a number of bio-monographs, highlighting the work of such significant artists as Khalid Iqbal, Moazzam Ali and Zubeida Agha. Her biographical study of Ijaz ul Hassan though stands apart from the others. It is a faultlessly researched tribute to an artistic genius of whom our country can be justifiably proud.

Musarrat is fortunate. She and Ijaz have been married now for over fifty years. Biographers do not normally get to spend that long researching their subjects. Such unbroken proximity can either breed contempt, or the sort of admiration that Musarrat so obviously feels for a man whom she regards not simply as a husband or father of their children, but as a friend, a mentor and an icon.

Institutions, it is said, make poor spouses and worse parents. Ijaz should be regarded as an exception. He has given as much time as they needed to his children and his grandchildren. Look out in the book for the delightful photograph of Ijaz helping his grandson Zahur ‘touch up’ one of Ijaz’s canvases. He has given his unswerving loyalty to his politics. And he has devoted his creative life to Art.    

In parallel, over the past seventy-five years of his crowded life, he has found time to excel at sports in Aitchison College, top in tennis at Government College, study English Literature at Cambridge University, teach Academics at the National College of Arts under Shakir Ali’s principal-ship, become a co-founder of the Pakistan Crafts Council, become a senior office bearer of the Punjab Wing of the Pakistan People’s Party, and go to jail during the barbed wire rule of General Ziaul Haq.

Many a lesser Pakistani would have retired exhausted after such labours. Not Ijaz. Instead, he retained (not always consistently) a passion for painting that has remained with him throughout his life’s voyage, like some friendly playful dolphin that swims alongside, dipping beneath the surface to re-emerge again unexpectedly.

In 1980, at the age of 43, Ijaz decided to jump ship and to mount the dolphin, and go wherever his talent could take him. Rather than be the politician or academician who also painted, he decided to take up art full-time       and professionally. He has never looked back.

Dr Musarrat has reproduced over 250 of Ijaz’s drawings, sketches, paintings, murals, and collages done over the past fifty years. It is a formidable body of work. She has supplemented her biographical narrative with illustrations that show Ijaz’s development from an impressionable, self-conscious acolyte of Gauguin, through phases when he toys with ribbons and folds, peers at glass bottles and china cups, challenges orthodoxy with brutal images of killings in Vietnam, installs ceramic murals, portrays the whiteness of a north American winter, and adopts the Laburnum or Amaltass as his leitmotif.

It would have been all too easy for Dr Musarrat to gloss over Ijaz’s expulsion from St Martin’s School in London. It is the wart on one’s career that most people would prefer to see painted over. Undaunted by this eviction, Ijaz joined Cambridge University (it was more liberal in those days and paid scant attention to such minor flaws) and there studied English Literature.

Writing forty years later, Ijaz reveals the seminal influence the British Romantic poets like William Wordsworth had on him: “In art I am taken by common things. A plant dangling from a crevice can be breathtaking: a bud more solemn than a marble dome, a common gesture more monumental than pious truths.’  It could have been the voice of Wordsworth closing his immortal Ode with the lines:

It cannot have been easy for Dr Musarrat to compress Ijaz’s myriad personality within 298 pages. By doing so, though, she has made Ijaz’s talent and his works accessible to a much wider audience than those who visit the homes of collectors fortunate enough to possess his works.

Some time ago, a sage had written about the Earth from a perspective that anticipated the view that 20^th century astronauts were to have of our beautiful planet.  

‘First of all the true earth, if one views it from above, is said to look like those twelve-piece leather balls, variegated, a patchwork of colours, of which our colours here are, as it were, samples of what painters use.  There the whole earth is of such colours, indeed of colours far brighter still and purer than these: one partition is purple, marvelous for its beauty, another is golden, and all that is white is whiter than chalk or snow; and the earth is composed of the other colours likewise, indeed of colours more numerous and beautiful than any we have seen.’[1] 

The sage was Socrates. He predated Ijaz ul Hassan by 2400 years. Yet, his words carry a resonance one can hear when viewing the panorama of Ijaz’s creative output – ‘variegated, a patchwork of colours’.

Musarrat has written a volume on Ijaz. Let the final word be his. Speaking of Nature, he confessed that ‘there cannot be a better companion in an estranged world.’

Ijaz could not have found a better companion than Musarrat nor a better biographer.

(C) F.S. AIJAZUDDIN, 27 April 2013