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Crème de la crème
Salwat Alireviews in depth the Jamil Naqsh Retrospective at the Mohatta Palace Museum, Karachi
This is not just another art exhibition. It is a comprehensive show which, in the words of co-curator Nasreen Askari, “needs to be taken in and savoured — returned to if necessary — by those wishing to benefit from it.”
No great museum retrospective is just a matter of a definitive array of works or of critical intelligence applied to them, or of a deep curiosity about the artist’s life. It is a combination of all three, a vision of how these weave together. Once you have digested a show like this one, neither you nor the artist will be quite the same.
The 600 paintings arranged in chronological order capture five decades of the artist’s oeuvre. Culled from a vast array of hitherto unseen works, ensconced in private collections, Mohatta has laboriously pieced together a remarkable outpouring of protean talent. To see Naqsh’s representative oeuvre assembled en masse, in the midst of a period personified by fast art, experiment and ambiguity is to be reminded that “lucidity, deliberation, probity and calm are still the chief virtues of the art of painting.”
Today when art is moving out in several new directions young art students can learn much about patience, innovation and dedication from this retrospective.
With a lifetime devoted to art, Naqsh emerges as an extremely productive artist, and his entire body of work a heady ode to love. Possessing a keen feeling for the poetic moments of the human gesture, he eulogizes the sentiment in concept and in deed. In the spectrum of the human figure, the female nude is his primary vehicle for expression, with the pigeon, horse and the child joining in as supporting cast during various phases of his growth as a painter.
Forging ahead with this limited cast and a singular theme, Naqsh, even after five decades, is still coming out with infinite variations in style, technique and posture. Is this a characteristic, an idiosyncrasy, in his work or just the fruits of enhanced skills and devotion to one’s calling? The exhibition answers for itself.
When Jamil Naqsh enrolled at Lahore’s Mayo School of Art (now NCA) in the late 1950s, premier modernist Shakir Ali had only just returned from his sojourn abroad to become mentor at large to a breed of young artists eager to adapt cubism to their emerging expression. Avidly absorbing this influence, Naqsh, however, opted to train as a miniature painter as Shagird (pupil) of Ustad Haji Sharif. Thus evolved the opposing strains of classicism and abstraction, which have appeared in his paintings in various guises, throughout his career.
By drawing on the holdings of the recently established Jamil Naqsh Museum and personal acquisitions of some fifty collectors, curators Nasreen Askari and Marjorie Husain have tried to retrieve the lost years. They have unearthed a considerable number of works pertaining to this period, which are now arranged in sequential order spread along fourteen galleries on the ground and first floors of the Mohatta Palace. The works are displayed under the titles of Pigeons, Woman and Pigeons, Mother and Child, Modern Manuscripts, Woman and Horse, Drawings, Woman, and Prajna and Paramita.
Exhibitions with a cerebral edge tantalize the mind and generate their own ripple effects. True, the Naqsh retrospective pulls at one’s heartstrings, but it also seems to suffer a bit from paucity of ideas. At places, one feels that the trance of being seduced by an image wears off rather quickly if the engaging concepts do not fire the imagination or stir the soul.
Textural and colouristic nuances are a hallmark of a Naqsh original. Hard, crusty impastos personify his canvas of the early ’60s, followed by abrasive, heavily sedimented surfaces before fine, grainy and more integrated meshing in oil on canvas began to emerge in his subsequent paintings. Strongly pigmented light-on-dark layering of colours created a rich pixellation of tonalities, which melded his images and planar division of space into a unified whole. Seamless transparent forms receded and emerged on the canvas, suggesting not only a medley of moods but also moments in time.
Enamoured by Italian sculptor Marino Marini, Naqsh also displayed a taste for strongly shaped sensuous masses and took effect from Marini’s habit of taking a passively posed body and imparting to its surface great richness of colour and texture. Marini wanted his surfaces to reveal the spiritual substratum of his subjects and Naqsh seems to have endeavoured towards this end in his later themes.
The Mother and Child series at the Mohatta Palace is alive with an ethereal interplay of light and form, created mainly by a very delicate balance of textural markings and tonal gradations of ivory, pale-gold and ochres. Similarly, many pieces in the Prajna and Paramita series contain a fine mesh and a close knit weave that has been laboriously etched out with black, blue and red ball points or single squirrel hair brushes common to miniature paintings.
He is at his sensitive best in his recreation of pearlized effects imitating burnished stone or marble-ized surfaces. He achieved these mainly through use of watercolour in the late ’80s and early ’90s. The Mohatta retrospective contains a liberal spread of all these varying painterly experiments, which enable a viewer to appreciate the artist as a great master of technique.
Naqsh’s name may be synonymous with pigeons but he has been and remains essentially a figurative painter. This retrospective traces the evolution of the female figure from the early years to date. Galleries 12, 13, 14, Woman, Prajna and Paramita: an Ode to Love are especially pertinent in this regard. Here the forms transition to full blown maturity, which is evident in all their sensuous languor. It shows Naqsh at his very best.
The figure as an aesthetic challenge demands perceptive investigation, empathy and imagination before it begins to reveal to the artist a personally satisfying basis for interpretation. In developing his own personal style, Naqsh has integrated and refined influences from both Ali Imam and Shakir Ali. His work in the early ’60s was realistic but gradually became stylized and the women he painted thence closely resemble Shakir Ali’s lanky tenuous models.
He painted them long limbed, sharp clawed and flat-chested. Often grim faced or stern in stark white on white simplicity, reminiscent of Ali Imam’s oeuvre, or in bright reds or blues that recall Shakir Ali’s Leda and the Swan to mind. Revolving between the abstract and the realistic, Naqsh’s stylized nude began to carry the stamp of his own aesthetic imagination, and idiosyncrasies.
A painting’s expression is revealed not only by the depicted matter but by the intrinsic character of the elements in the pace and the temperament of their interplay, in the artist’s handwriting and even in the usage of the medium. Expression is as much part of the painting’s design as the design is the key to the painting’s mood.
For Naqsh, the theme of unrequited love has endless fascination and he has exploited its inherent potential to create mood and feeling in his compositions. For decades now this emotive charge has fuelled his expression but it is essentially technical treatment and chromatic subtlety that have enhanced this expression and given momentum to his oeuvre.
With a major portion of his signature nudes closeted in private collections, Naqsh’s work to an average viewer, is largely synonymous with pigeons. Naqsh’s most enduring emblem, these feathered friends have a childhood association with the artist dating back to his Kairana days where, it is stated, they “roosted in the courtyard and flew freely through open windows” of his ancestral home. This affinity continues to this day as “Naqsh allows the birds to fly through the windows of his studio, sit on his shoulders and strut around the room.”
However, in his composition of the nude and pigeon, Naqsh’s reference is cultural. The intimate closeness of a woman and a bird is a parallel to the Mughal miniature where the lonely beloved pining for her lover seeks consolation amongst these winged creatures. In Urdu literature, prose and poetry, the birds have similar romantic connotations and we are all familiar with their universal significance as doves of peace.
Jamil Naqsh’s intimate cameos of pigeons reveal not only his close observation and association with the birds but also his deep affection for them. Button-eyed with sharply chiselled beaks, they are gracefully proportioned, often full bodied and buxom. The artist paints them in pairs or groups, preening, pecking or nuzzling together. In flight, mid-air or just strutting across the canvas, they imbue the work with an aura of romance, lyricism and harmony. Many are white, while others are soft grey or brown, often with reddish tints; some have iridescent patches or black and white markings on neck, wings or tails.
Naqsh is also in the habit of making multiple versions of a single image. An entire wall in gallery 2 dedicated to over two dozen images of a single pigeon reveal the master’s obsession not just with the subject but also with the painterly process. Like a conjurer, he is able to bring infinite variations in colour and presentation to a single object. Prior to the pigeons, the artist may have toyed with the idea of painting parrots. A painting of two green parrots on display bears testimony to this alternative.
Not content with the poetic connotations of a pigeon symbolizing the absent lover, Naqsh, aspiring for a more emphatic expression to convey togetherness became attracted to the virile grace of the horse. In ancient mythology, the horse was the emblem of the sun as the ox was that of the moon. In Renaissance, however, the horse was most often depicted as a symbol of lust.
On an inventive surge, Naqsh bypassed traditional Asian symbology of the horse to explore modern idioms. Drawing inspiration from Marino Marini, who single-handedly revived the art of sculpture in Italy in the 20th century, he studied at length his hefty nudes and horse and rider series — only to produce his own version of Woman and Horse. An original painter striving for a personalized vocabulary, he contrives new elements of design. A complex interplay of image and motif (Woman and Horse) enacted in strongly linear rhythms personify this phase of his oeuvre. The horse as a symbol of the male presence encompassed, enslaved and accompanied by the nude in a variety of mannerisms, has resulted in amatory compositions signifying fusion and unity.
This graphic melding of form was given timeless appeal with finely wrought textural subtleties and chromatic sensitivity. Sanded, burnished hues of weathered stones were a marked feature in this body of work which is often deeply erotic.
It is said that Naqsh lost his mother in his fifth year and feels the loss of what he refers to as “the only unquestioning love that exists”. Perhaps it is these sentiments that have brought unusually strong biological bonding to his Mother and Child coupling. Strongly structured yogic postures of the nude with infant in gossamery, fine grained textures in pale-gold and ivory hues envelope the work in an evanescent glow.
These sharply defined yet delicately rendered figurative forms are yet another variant on the theme of love that is central to Naqsh’s creativity. He painted the series in 1977, dedicating it to his friend Dr Faridon Setna, the renowned gynaecologist.
His first break
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Naqsh’s earliest themes, often painted in watercolour, included a variety of other subjects: bazaar scenes, faces, figures, still life and landscape. As early as 1959, barely 21 years old, Jamil Naqsh entered the exhibition circuit and displayed his work at the newly-built The Arts Council of Pakistan in Karachi. Solo exhibitions followed between 1960 and ’63. This is also the time when his celebrated pigeons first emerged on canvas and with them came the flutter of recognition, popularity and success.By the end of the ’60s, Naqsh had ceased to paint for exhibitions. He was, by then, highly regarded by a growing number of collectors eager to buy his work. This hiatus finally ended in 1998, when some significant exhibitions were mounted in Karachi and Islamabad, namely “Mother and Child”, Modern Manuscripts, and Homage to Marino Marini under the aegis of the Jamil Naqsh Museum.
However, the intervening decades of the ’70, the ’80s and the early ’90 were lost to the public and this is where Mohatta has rendered an invaluable service. — Salwat Ali
Modern manuscripts
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Jamil Naqsh’s grounding in the miniature tradition has surfaced in almost every aspect of his art. His calligraphy also stems from this foundation, but once again he has opted for originality and individual flair.Tackling the genre as an independent element of design, he has evolved his own signs and symbols pertinent to the Arabic script. His personalized handwriting is a challenging adventure in graphics. Sometimes a complex scrawl reminiscent of “hakeemi nuskhas”, it has often taken inspiration from the calligraphic impulse of a Chinese scholar and then there are other examples like the severely abstract Tantric manifesto.
Linear manipulation, not to beautify the written word but as an element of mass, is his major concern. His modern manuscripts are essentially exercises in complex modern art where traditional calligraphy is merely an inspiring agent. Hence, they do not pertain to the rules of the purist form and legibility. — Salwat Ali
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