PSEUDO CRITICS WITH NO CAPACITY FOR AESTHETICS; 
SOCIETY UNTRAINED SYMBOLISM OF PICTORIAL ART.
OBSESSIVE FOREIGN WRITERS UNDOING FOUNDATIONS;
CHALLENGING ICONIC ARTIST M.A. RAHMAN CHUGHTAI.

My father the artist M.A. Rahman Chughtai was the gift of Allah to this society. After a visit to Europe in 1932 and 1937, he came firmly to believe that he would create Art Revolution in Pakistan. Malik Shamas the Curator of Lahore Museum used to say this society can dissect a poetic verse in a hundred and one ways, but they have no capacity to do the same for pictorial art. I see that here in my fifty years of exhibition shows and innumerable  people visiting us. Our people dress in most fashionable ways possible and stand in the center of gallery to attract attention to themselves, and in one sweep can look at all the paintings, and literally get nothing from them. The word can be “Beautiful” and things like that and this was the complaint of my father. You need to look at a painting for a period of time to understand it. Leonardo da Vinci created the Mona Lisa and to this day people talk about its intricacies and unsaid messages. A layer of meanings in works of all Masters, and certainly the same applies to Chughtai Art. I have myself seen a British artist and critic, Heather Bolton spending hours on five of Chughtai’s unfinished works, relishing the pleasure of same, and even thanking me with a note after flying home.

The most amazing thing about people with low aesthetic levels  and no capacity for art appreciation, is that they jump on the conspiratorial wagon. Certainly a Pakistani lobby is working for a British agency. How can anyone jump to opinion without even looking at a handful of works? Throughout I invited people posing as critics and art appreciators to come and view Chughtai Art in original. About eighty percent of his creation is with us. People form an opinion by looking superficially at some of his published works. They see nothing, for their perceptions are not cultivated by culture and history. Influx of Western world and ideas have already dulled their own cultural spirit. The world of Chughtai Art is a world on its own. No relation to any other world. The figures are unique and belong to all categories of life, rich and poor, kings and faqeers, young and old, men and women, individuals and groups, dressed and undressed, and expected and totally unexpected.  Endless parade of a vision. He had to create a platform for his work. Of Course the works are all related to the East, more particularly Islamic East. But the visuals are all designed by him, based on particulars of no actual period. It is a Chughtai’s world. It remains so, untouched by time itself.

As Chughtai has said himself, all his works start from a story, which comes to his mind. A story of interaction of people both in family home settings as well as pastoral surroundings. Or any other imagined situation. But the same is not representational as a photographic record. It has two unique features unknown to Islamic art. It has a behavioural element to the interaction of people. And this psychological impact is best expressed by him through a millionth variation of mouth and eyes. Gentle twists of mouth, as well as eyes, from closed ones to open ones, and various in-between. Expressions which belie a great or ordinary painting. No one can copy these even if they decide to trace the original. The difference is so minute. The second impact is the composition of the body. A body which is not truly representational of human body with elongated fingers, hands, legs, and postures. The Chughtai world is a world where he fashions the body to his own perfection.

The Artist of the East was in a position to mock Aristotle’s Golden Mean, with a body fashioned in his art ranging from both extremes, the most or the least. We note that:

“The golden ratio, also known as the golden mean or divine proportion, is a mathematical ratio (approximately 1:1.618) found in nature and art, believed to create visually pleasing and harmonious compositions. It can be used to determine the proportions of elements within a piece, creating a sense of balance and aesthetic appeal.”

The proportions in Chughtai art capture its most harmony. On this back note, the artist spins his story.

So after the story what happens, on a small scrap of paper the work is roughly conceived in perception. Chughtai never sits idle. He has a number of these scraps to play with in time. Eventually he decides to dive in one and enlarges it to his regular version of cut position of Imperial size paper. The form is there, the details missing. An archive of 3000 pencil sketches tells us how busy he was, as he himself stated that if his life is limited by eighty years of age, he cannot complete even his already drawn works if he lives to another eighty years. And the subjects are overwhelming. At times they look unbelievable. His photographic eyes move in positions unimaginable by most artists, and least of all pseudo critics, who have no aesthetics to understand them.

Once upon a time the world viewed artist Chughtai in different light. The newer world view is different. Stressing on some vague concepts as Global art, the point of view is to ridicule anything that brings identity to a nation. In Pakistan the National Identity is the first step towards a Modern Islamic Identity. This was a small note in the ideas of critic Ms Simone Willie in 2015 and 2017. She wrote in her book “Modern Art in Pakistan”:

“Despite his contact with Calcutta and the Bengal School, Chughtai emphasized his connection to Lahore and promoted the idea of a Punjab School, or Lahore School, consisting of Muslim artists. With decolonization, the growing consciousness of a Muslim cultural position as opposed to a nascent Hindu nationalist construction came to define an important element of modernism  for South Asian artists.”

This new “sense of place” was certainly resented by modern critics pining to undo all identity feeling from the new country Pakistan by placing it as a mere step of a 5000 years old heritage. Ms Simone Willie did call here to discuss same with me, but could not undo my firm belief in the Identity crisis being deliberately created, by resuscitating the forlorn world of Shakir Ali and others as champion of Pakistani forward movement. Most of these artists came to Pakistan much later 1947 with their brand of mission, sponsored by agencies to undo the spirit of Pakistan. Copyists copying the West, aping things which had no relevance for them or for Pakistan. These artists engendered despair in the country. Their own record is open to research. Less said here!

A lot of world critics concentrate on me as well. Ifftikhar Dadi has written to me often and sought help in matters. Partha Mittar called here and went very happy. And some have mixed reactions. Perhaps the agenda is different. A very nice lady, Gemma Sharpe is an English woman, teaching art in an American University. A strange dilemma she is working on with a message of Global arts. She visited us and would not agree on concepts of National Art. It is best to let her reproduce her views in her own words:

My ongoing book project, Modernist Agencies: Art and Cold War Culture in Pakistan is forthcoming and has been supported by the Modernist Studies Association, American Institute of Pakistan Studies, among others.  

“My scholarship is invested in global exhibition and museum histories, legacies of Cold War internationalism, and modern art’s relationship to institutions, especially of the state. My specific area of focus is modern and contemporary art from Pakistan and its diasporas.

My in-progress first book, Modernist Agencies: Art and Cold War Politics in Pakistan, shows how artists in Pakistan and by extension pre-1971 Bangladesh navigated the shifting, overlapping, and often contradictory concepts of the “nation” and the “state” during the late-colonial and postcolonial decades. The book offers a deeply archival study of modernist art in Pakistan and pre-1971 Bangladesh that uses exhibition and institutional case studies to provide a synthetic view of modernism in this context. It shows how artists moved knowingly and strategically through forces of institutional and state co-option in the postcolonial decades. Gemma Sharpe. “

A series of discourses on Chughtai Art follows and must be read one by one. Obviously the written agenda is bigger than a blog can capture in few words. I will try my best to pick up all the necessary narrations. There is Art in Pakistan and there is Pakistani Art. It is time to take the Art Gimmickry at its roots of destroying the foundations of a growing nation. Modern definition of Pakistan. Blessings of Allah be upon us!