Khalid Iqbal’s many seasons

The Lahore Arts Council was a Raj double-storey residence then. Glimpsed through a grove of pine trees, it was approached across a seasonal carpet of russet pine-needles. In the early sixties, its extensive garden housed a corrugate-roof shack. The front half was the art gallery, the rear where evening art classes were held.

Then Ali Imam came to town. Prompted by a first visit to his solo show, I showed him my work. He looked at it, and ambled to the rear carrying one of the paintings.

[quote]A gray haired man with avuncular features came, looked at the paintings; nodded[/quote]

“Khalid,” he called across the surround of trainees. A gray haired man with avuncular features came, looked at the paintings; nodded. I could join his class. The other two instructors were Colin David and Miss Naseem Qazi. The three were amongst the finest artists of the country. Under them I learnt to see.

Early seventies and I met Taufiq Rafat, the foremost poet of English in Pakistan. He re-introduced me to Khalid Sahib, already a legend among the cognoscenti. A few years later I returned from Oxford and was invited to teach English at the NCA. Under the pompous, compensatory euphemism of “Visiting Associate Professor”, the student became colleague. I saw a small landscape. Yes, it was for sale. But he would not name the price. Yes, my first one month’s salary would do. So clutching the pay envelope, I went to his office. He accepted the mere 375 rupees. My first Khalid Iqbal.

The spectral spread of Pakistani painting, soon after Independence in 1947 was defined by the “traditionalists” at one end and the “modernists” at the other. The romantic lyricism of A.R. Chughtai, the nostalgic imitations of the miniaturists and the rustic idealism of Allah Bux coexisted with the expressionist verve of Anna Molka Ahmed and Zainul Abidin, and the semi-abstract and abstract work of Shakir Ali and Zubaida Agha. The most normative was apparently ignored: realism. If it existed it was confined to academic exercises. On the national scene it was indistinctive and undistinguished. Within the first decade of the mid-fifties, however a visual redefinition was single handedly initiated by one man: Khalid Iqbal.

Born in Simla 1929, Khalid Iqbal passed the Senior Cambridge examination from St. Joseph’s Academy, Dehradun (1945), and graduated from the Punjab University (1949). A stint as Art Teacher at Aitchison College (1949 – 1952) was followed by three years at the Slade School of Fine Arts, London. Here he won the Painting Prize for his masterpiece, “Hampstead” which was so evocative that a painter-member of the jury, Victor Passmore, remarked, “the grass has just been walked upon”. Appointed Senior Lecturer at the Department of Fine Arts, Punjab University in 1956, he soon became the centre of the turning world of young artists. Serious differences with the redoubtable Anna Molka Ahmed led to his departure for the National College of Arts in 1965 as Head of Fine Arts Department. There as Professor and later as Principal, through teaching and practice he continued to influence generations of painters. In 1981 he resigned from the College to paint full time.

Known widely for his landscapes of Lahore’s marginal areas, Khalid Iqbal has also produced important, if limited number of, still-lifes and portraits. In fact some of these can rank with the finest produced in the twentieth century. The consistency of vision and execution unites his subjects. The same predominantly austere and intense perception pervades all his work. Refined brush-strokes, studied and subtle texture of paint, sweeping but controlled use of palette knife and application of thin oil paint, contribute towards an organic style. His style emerges from within his work and is not an external imposition.

The artist’s still-lifes are the stuff household life is made on: a glass of water, a flower or two, a kitchen towel, some onions, garlic, a folded newspaper, an ashtray, egg-cups, a piece of cloth, broken terra-cotta pot, a thorny sprig. Such subjects demonstrate the joy of, and the joy in, the routine and the unremarkable.

[quote]His students, professional models and, later, the extended family of his gardener, appropriately named, Boota held his attention[/quote]

Not celebrities, not the well-to-do, not the powerful and the glamorous are subjects for his portraits. These he avoided. His students, professional models and, later, the extended family of his gardener, appropriately named, Boota held his attention. In many an exquisitely observed portrait, the thin oil paint and the execution is reminiscent of William Coldstream (1908 – 1987). The influence of Coldstream, one of his teachers at, and the Principal of, the Slade, the artist often acknowledged. By preferring the common, Khalid Iqbal not only makes a social statement but obliges one to look at the work, the purity of the creative process, rather than its extra-artistic aspects. This aspect has led to his veneration as a painters’ painter.

[quote]This new visual sensibility also affected his students, from Baluchistan, NWFP and Sindh[/quote]

Landscape painting was the chief creation of the nineteenth century in the West. But it did not arrive in South Asia till Khalid Iqbal. It occupies a central place in his achievement and reputation. There were no indigenous standards to subject his work to. Landscape as it existed was an adjunct to figurative work, or was symbolic, or idealistic, or fantastic. Although plein aire painting was introduced by Anna Molka Ahmed, it was Khalid Iqbal who through tenacity of purpose and consistency of vision engendered a movement now recognized as the Punjab Landscape School. This new visual sensibility also affected his students, from Baluchistan, NWFP and Sindh, who similarly transformed the painterly rendering of their home provinces.

Khalid Iqbal’s landscapes are “landscapes of fact”. They portray, in Kenneth Clarke’s phrase, “recognizable experience”. The freshness of his landscapes lies in their immediacy. The subject is observed directly and painted on the spot, in situ. It is a recognizable, unidealized view. His standard is the high standard he has set himself, a standard in the best tradition of Western realists like Velasquez (1599-1660) and Constable (1776-1837).

Khalid Iqbal’s landscapes avoid the scenic, the picturesque, the pretty. They focus on the essential, the ordinary, the miss-able. No object, in the artist’s repertoire, is ugly. The subjects – bushes, rain-filled ditches, pools of water and floating algea, saline stretches, trees dry or in flower, dilapidated brick-kilns — are observed in tonal detail and rendered with meticulous nuances of tints. The painter’s vision finds a correlational aesthetic, transforming their awkwardness and angularity into a cohesive whole. The composite strokes of colour, marks of brush, therefore approximate the observed, ordinary subject and elevate it to the condition of art. Like great art, his paintings raise the humble to the memorable.

Each section of the painter’s work – the foreground, the middle distance and the far distance – is painted with equal attention. No area is over- or under-painted for effect. The total effect is achieved through sensitive juxtaposition of these areas. The “infinite visual data” of landscape is subordinated to “a single pictorial idea”. Diverse images complement each other, enhancing the general scheme and compositional unity. That is why the details in the far distance or in the peripheral parts of his work elicit an interest not dissimilar to the central.

[quote]His landscapes surround the viewer till he begins to experience the same heat and dust, the fog and the fleeting moments he did[/quote]

Little variation is visible in the painter’s sky: no drifting or rain-bearing clouds. Almost always the same even gray provides a muted drop for the “chiaroscuro of nature” below. Constable’s operative phrase is adapted to this terrain to reflect a not dissimilar “drama of light and shade”. Khalid Iqbal leads one into his landscapes. They surround the viewer till he begins to experience the same heat and dust, the fog and the fleeting moments he did. He is a paysagist who through the visual communicates more than just the visual.

The core concern, however, is more elusive. It is light. Light, perceived in climatic variations of the atmosphere and the changing mood of nature. Light in its fleeting moments: tremulous early light on weathered water-edge illuminating some areas, throwing others into deeper shadows; dawn tentatively touching land’s rough undulations; swift twilight as it lingers on and lifts off the uneven, overgrown ground; or when morning mist lies low in the winter grass or hovers in the trees or near buildings, or blurs wild bushes among grass dried ochre by rainless days. Such transience is captured without sentimentality, deftly. These moments are seen in their actuality, their entirety. The eye does not see as it should. The eye sees what there is.

But all is not austere in Khalid Iqbal’s many seasons. There is also a celebratory aspect when the land’s colours are commemorated. When the Gul-mohur or the Indian-coral bursts into scarlet flowers, when the Laburnum blooms its ochre abundance, when the Jacaranda is awash with violet bunches and when the monsoon washes everything to a brilliant palette of green, the painter responds with the same keen sense.

Khalid Iqbal’s achievement, thus, has two dimensions: the personal and the public. He exemplifies the best in visual realism in his work. At the public level he initiated a whole new way of seeing.

A few years ago, a stroke incapacitated him. His last public appearance was a collective effort: my urging, his sister Faiqa’s assistance and escort by Zulqarnain Haider. The occasion was a dedication at the Punjab University which he had left so many decades ago in acrimony. His eyes beamed. His emaciated cheeks were rosy with pleasure. It was a reconciliation of sorts. With life. With approaching death.

Khalid Iqbal is dead. Khalid Iqbals live.

M. Athar Tahir, the Rhodes Scholar 1974, has won eight national, and one international, awards for his books on Art, Calligraphy and Literature. He is the Editor of the forthcoming Oxford Companion to Pakistani Art