In memory of Khalid Iqbal, Pakistan’s legendary artist
We are all gathered here to pay our respect and tribute to Prof Khalid Iqbal. Khalid Iqbal as an artist was a person of enormous national significance. He was a painter of painters, a teacher of teachers, an icon of truth for those who sincerely pursue creative expression. He held firm views about painting and life but neither enforced them or sought endorsement from others. As a rule he preferred to remain aloof and was greatly respected for it.
He was born on 23rd June, 1929, at Simla and was sent to school at Dehradun. In the mid 1950s he joined Aitchison College Lahore as an Art Teacher and later proceeded to study painting at the Slade School of Art, London. Subsequently, after the Slade, he came back and joined the Fine Arts Department of Punjab University. In 1964 Khalid joined the National College of Arts, of which he later became the principal.
Khalid Iqbal as mentioned had his schooling at the well known Boarding School at Dehradun. He grew up to be a man of immense sophistication, both of mind and manners, but kept his anglicised self buried under a cultivated casual demeanour. He was essentially a highbrowed person – tight lipped to strangers, and amiable and amusing to only those known to him. He possessed a tremendous sense of humor; often a tear or two innocently drained out of his eyes when someone skillfully narrated him a joke, but ironically he never experienced life as fun.
It is quite amazing how a man of his intellect and inherited middle class social attributes could own and sympathise with common sights and familiar routine stuff pertaining to common life. Khalid truthfully observed and recorded their appearance that enriched and enhanced the perception and awareness of generations of painters, art students and citizens. What Constable did for the English and Manet, Monet and their contemporaries for the French – making them actually see for the first time how they and their surroundings actually looked – Khalid performed the same task for us. A leap in a different direction from Ustad Allah Baksh’s vivid romantic depiction of Punjab landscape and A R Chugtai’s radiant classical conceptions. In Khalid’s landscapes no viewer can visualise or even dream a congregation of village maidens under his sinuous foliage of stray trees, nor can one ever dream of a classical heroin sailing across a fodder field in the far distance or draping over a mud wall or pining for her lover stretched on a parched stretch in the foreground of his landscapes.
Khalid Iqbal as a painter and an individual never flattered persons or spiced his works. His objectivity hardly ever wavered. While painting he treated all elements of the picture surface with equal respect, which enabled the artist to establish aesthetic unity and a sense of timelessness. Regardless of the nature of the subject there is not the slightest budge in his method and process of painting. This is manifest in his works ranging from landscapes, still life and portraits.
Many admires of his landscapes are not familiar with his quite a few splendidly rendered portraits. He perceived a person with the same detachment as he would paint any insensate object. Most individuals who want their portrait painted like the artist to improve upon them. It is understandable why Khalid was never commissioned for a portrait, a commission he would never have accepted. The portraits that he rendered at his own choosing and leisure are a treasure. These portraits range from a formal rendition of Anna Molka and other fellow artists to folks who worked for him.
With Khalid Iqbal’s demise a dynamic period of Pakistani painting has come to an end. It was an eclectic period of trials and errors, a period of sifting grain from chaff, creatively enhancing discursive interaction. Above all in this post-colonial period artists were challenged to redefine themselves to the new times and the widening world. These were the decades when art was prized for itself without support of words, when Khalid, Shakir and Anna Molka could in spite of their enormous artistic disparities, creatively coexist. A work of art was itself its own and only justification. It did not need a validation outside itself, as is the practice now. Art in those days stood its ground on its own two bare feet; artists were defined by their work. When artists talked they talked themselves, seldom needing’ spokespersons’.
Sadly Khalid has passed on. Sadly memory of his person, like all temporal things, will fade with time. I am certain that his work and ideas will always remain a source of artistic enrichment and gratifications for thirsty minds and for all those who need to truthfully seize their perceptions and structure their feelings and aesthetic experience.
Prof Khalid Iqbal died on 23rd June, the date he was born on. What a tidy, balanced ending like most of his paintings.
Note: The Artists’ Association of Punjab, a representative body of the artists, arranged a reference in memory of the late Khalid Iqbal on 26th June, 2014, at Alhamra Arts Council. Since Mian Ijaz ul Hassan was out of country, this article, written by him, was read at this event.