In a still rapidly expanding art world, Jamil Naqsh holds a key position. He is the best known contemporary artist from Pakistan, long famous in his own country, and also well-established in international auctions.(Click here to view Art Market Analysis) This is, however, his first solo show in London, where he now lives as a recluse. It is not a full retrospective, but it takes up some of the major themes of his career. It also reflects, not just the culture of Pakistan, but also that of the whole of the Indian subcontinent, both Muslim and non-Muslim. In particular, there are many echoes of the imperial Mughal regime that once ruled the whole of India. At the same time, the exhibition demonstrates how an artist with major gifts, coming from this background, has been able to enter into a fruitful relationship with western Modernism, and thus link himself to what is now a worldwide community of visual artists.

Naqsh was not born in what is now Pakistan, but at Kairana in Uttar Paradesh, India the second youngest child in a cultivated Muslim family. His mother died when he was very young. At the time of partition (1947), he moved to Karachi, leaving his father behind. Naqsh was never to see him again. When he briefly returned to Kairana at the age of fourteen, after his father’s death, he realized it could no longer be his home. His destiny was now in Pakistan.

When he decided that his destiny was to be an artist, there seemed to be two paths open to him. One was to become a painter using European techniques, by studying at the Mayo School in Lahore (now the National College of Arts). The other was to learn the traditional methods of Mughal miniature painting, which had never been completely lost. He decided that the two approaches were not mutually exclusive.

At the same time, he was, like the other young Pakistani artists of his generation, exposed to the main figures in European Modernism, and also to works by the major European Old Masters – not through seeing the originals, but through images in books and magazines. Theirs was perhaps the first generation in Pakistan to benefit from the post- World War II revolution in colour printing. In this exhibition, for example, there are a number of paintings inspired by the work of the Italian sculptor Marino Marini. Shaukat Aziz, formerly Prime Minister of Pakistan, and now also resident in London, remembers giving Jamil Naqsh newly published books about this artist, and his immediate excitement on receiving them.

Another source of inspiration, inevitably, was Picasso; and yet another was the work of the great French neo-classicist, Jean-Dominique Ingres. The impact made by Ingres is particularly interesting, since Ingres, in some paintings, was a leader of the ‘orientalist’ tendency in 19th century Europeanart, since fiercely condemned by Edward Said. Naqsh re-absorbs Ingres, and re-forges links to the sensuous, erotic tradition that plays so large a part in Mughal miniature painting.

The sources Naqsh uses are in fact very diverse. One sees not only the impact of Mughal work, and of European masters, such as those I have just named, but also that of pre-Islamic Indian sculpture – in particular the erotic reliefs on the temples of Khajuraho,Puri and Bhuvaneshwar, which were created between 950 and 1150 c.e. Clearly what attracted him to these was their celebration of the female body. Naqsh’s paintings of female nudes have an extraordinary, quasi- sculptural plasticity, so much so that they almost seem to invite one to touch them.

One of the things that one learns from this series of nudes is that Naqsh’s attitude to his artistic sources is non- hierarchical. He sees the works of art that interest him as things-in-themselves, outside the framework of conventional art history. This makes him an important forerunner: he arrived at the philosophical and aesthetic position we now describe as ‘Post Modern’ long before most of his colleagues and rivals in the West.

As this exhibition demonstrates, Naqsh’s work has long tended to develop in series, though the themes on occasion overlap. In Pakistan he is probably most loved for his images of pigeons, or of women and pigeons combined. These birds have a deep personal meaning for him. As a child, he saw them flying in and out of the courtyard of the family house. In personal terms, they offer a nostalgic glance backwards – a glimpse of the familiar, the domestic, the soothing - of the pleasures of traditional family life, snatched away from him by the trauma of his mother’s early death, followed by the violence of Partition.

They also, however, refer to a deeply romantic element in the tradition of the art of the Indian subcontinent, specifically the art forms associated with the princely courts of the Mughal epoch, both Muslim and Hindu. This comment applies not only to art, but other, non-visual forms of artistic expression, such as poetry and music. The ghazal poetry of the great 19th century Urdu poet Mirza Ghalib, known to Urdu speakers throughout the world, has had a particular influence on Naqsh’s work. One striking feature of poems in ghazal form is that their over-riding subject is love. Each is the representation of a particular emotional moment. This is also true of those paintings by Naqsh where images of women and pigeons are combined. The pigeons are, in this case, the secret messengers of love.

This particular group of images may help to explain Naqsh’s decision to become a recluse, at a time when he might be enjoying his considerable celebrity, in Pakistan and elsewhere. It is not that he wholly rejects the world outside. He reads newspapers and books, he watches the news on television. He is interested in music, literature and philosophy. Yet he also feels a need to listen tranquilly to the inner voices that guide his work. What happens in his head eventually gives birth to the images he allows us to see.

Edward Lucie-Smith Art Historian, Critic and Writer