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Abdur Rehman Chughtai [1899-1975]
Born in Lahore in 1899 in a family of artists and architects, Abdur Rehman Chughtai was a self-taught artist. He painted his first colour paintings in 1919 and, rose to international fame in 1928 with the publication of his book "Muraqqa-e-Chughtai" an illustrated rendition of Mirza Ghalib’s Poetry.
Chughtai paid a two-year visit to London in 1932 along with the poet-philosopher Allama Muhammad Iqbal. His paintings on Allama’s verse completed in 25 years were published in 1968.
He also taught at the Mayo School of Arts, Lahore for a decade. He was conferred the title of Khan Bahadur by the British Government in 1940 and Hilal-e-Imtiaz in 1960 by the Government of Pakistan. He was later awarded President’s Medal for "Pride of Performance".
Chughtai devoted last part of his life to the colour paintings of the verses of Omar Khayyam. Chughtai breathed his last on January 17, 1975 at Lahore at the age of 76 years.
His Works
With the passing away of A. R. Chughtai, an epoch has ended. He was the master representative of the classical romantic tradition in painting, whose inspirational roots were firmly grounded in our cultural history.
During his lifetime, his virile brush had attracted a group of young disciples about him and there was, for a time, talks of a Chughtai School of painting being born. But none of them apparently acquired his individual magic touch or approached near enough to the lonesome heights of his artistic sensibility to carry forward his mission of synthesizing beauty and power, which Chughtai had imbibed from the poet-philosopher, Allama Iqbal.
With the modern trend towards greater and greater abstraction in Art, mostly mimetic of Western styles, Chughtai seems destined to appear in our aesthetic annals as a solitary colossus striding across the field of our graphic arts.
His genius had flowered early. He emerged as a phenomenon in the Indian subcontinent long before the partition and was hailed as a new star in the artistic firmament, whose refulgence gained instant recognition from connoisseurs, both Eastern and Western. In 1928, when he was only 29, he brought out his "Muraqqa-i-Chughtai", an exquisitely illustrated edition of Ghalib’s Urdu Diwan.
Allama Muhammad Iqbal contributed a foreword to the publication in which he described the Muraqqa as "a unique enterprise in modern Indian painting and printing". Iqbal also recorded his belief there-in that with the single exception of Architecture, the Art of Islam is yet to be born-"the art, that is to say, which aims at the human assimilation of Divine attributes (Tukhlaqu Ba Khalaqullah) gives man infinite aspiration (Ajrun Ghair Mamnun) and finally wins for him the status of "God’s representative on earth". Iqbal found in the Muraqqa "indications to show that the young artist of the Punjab is already on the way to feel his responsibility as an artist".
Dr. James H. Cousins, in his introduction to the work, made the acute observation that "the remoteness from so-called realism which Chughtai has deliberately cultivated, will be specially acceptable to those who are now feeling the pull away from an alleged truthfulness to eye sight towards the truth of the imagination".
About Chughtai’s achievement he remarked that "he retains the distinctive mood and posture of the Persian tradition but gives his pictures a special quality of his own, in lovely colour combination, in delicious lines that seem to be less lines of painting than of some inaudible poetry made visible". The folds of drapery appearing in Chughtai’s creations, were characterised by him as a "liturgy of beauty" and his decorative backgrounds based on Saracenic architecture as "calling the imagination away from the tyranny of the actual into free citizenship of the realm of romance.
In his Urdu preface to this work, Chughtai declared that "by its publication he aimed at embodying the soul of Asian civilisation and culture, of which added thereto occurs significant observation that a painting is not a mere representation of the visible phenomena but an interpretation of the painter’s own mind".
It provides a clue to the motifs of Chughtai’s Art. His own personality, enriched with the heritage of Islamic, Iranian and Mughal traditions, finds expression in his individualistic original style. It imports neither a faithful reproduction of nature nor is it imitative of any Western School of Art.
The values of his faith were dear to Chughtai and their spirit is reflected in his chaste passion and artistic restraint in his creative ventures. His orientalism was his pride and his inspiration was in tune with the infinite. He was not merely wrapped up in the past but conjured up past glories to light up the road to the future.
The Muraqqa had a sequel in "Naqsh-i-Chughtai" which includes an additional set of beautiful illustrations of Ghalib’s thought.
As behoved his universalistic Islamic soul, he appreciated manifestations of charm, vitality and dynamism wherever he found them. A collection of his "Indian Paintings" published from Delhi in 1951, relates to the early period of this creative life. In this delightful publication, the Indian motifs that appealed to his sensibility partake of the hue of his ruling passion for beauty and power.
It was in December 1949 that the Pakistan Arts Council, Lahore had given financial aid for this venture to the tune of Rs. 50,000 through the Board for Advancement of Literature, Lahore. This was repaid by the artist in the shape of an adequate number of copies of the work, supplied to the Government. The title of Khan Bahadur was conferred on Chughtai by the British Government in pre-partition times. The Pakistan Government had honoured him with a Hilal-i-Imtiaz.
Chughtai belongs to that band of immortals whose work will endure long after the fashion of hybrid imitative art, popular today with our younger generation, will have passed away. Chughtai was a prolific painter and his creative image gave him little rest right till the end of his life.
His principal medium was water colours in which his work is unsurpassed. He also executed a considerable number of superb etchings, with immaculate skill. If his paintings display an architectonic quality, it is not surprising. That perhaps is a reflex of his ancestral heritage. For, as he himself told, his great grand-father, Baba Saleh, was an architect and his lineage includes the builder of the Taj, the Red Fort and the Badshahi Mosque.
Beside the products of his own creative genius, Chughtai has left behind a unique collection of classical calligraphic inscriptions and a most valuable assemblage of paintings by Eastern and Western masters which could be the pride of a distinctive Art Gallery.
Born in Lahore in 1899 in a family of artists and architects, Abdur Rehman Chughtai was a self-taught artist. He painted his first colour paintings in 1919 and, rose to international fame in 1928 with the publication of his book "Muraqqa-e-Chughtai" an illustrated rendition of Mirza Ghalib’s Poetry.
Chughtai paid a two-year visit to London in 1932 along with the poet-philosopher Allama Muhammad Iqbal. His paintings on Allama’s verse completed in 25 years were published in 1968.
He also taught at the Mayo School of Arts, Lahore for a decade. He was conferred the title of Khan Bahadur by the British Government in 1940 and Hilal-e-Imtiaz in 1960 by the Government of Pakistan. He was later awarded President’s Medal for "Pride of Performance".
Chughtai devoted last part of his life to the colour paintings of the verses of Omar Khayyam. Chughtai breathed his last on January 17, 1975 at Lahore at the age of 76 years.
His Works
With the passing away of A. R. Chughtai, an epoch has ended. He was the master representative of the classical romantic tradition in painting, whose inspirational roots were firmly grounded in our cultural history.
During his lifetime, his virile brush had attracted a group of young disciples about him and there was, for a time, talks of a Chughtai School of painting being born. But none of them apparently acquired his individual magic touch or approached near enough to the lonesome heights of his artistic sensibility to carry forward his mission of synthesizing beauty and power, which Chughtai had imbibed from the poet-philosopher, Allama Iqbal.
With the modern trend towards greater and greater abstraction in Art, mostly mimetic of Western styles, Chughtai seems destined to appear in our aesthetic annals as a solitary colossus striding across the field of our graphic arts.
His genius had flowered early. He emerged as a phenomenon in the Indian subcontinent long before the partition and was hailed as a new star in the artistic firmament, whose refulgence gained instant recognition from connoisseurs, both Eastern and Western. In 1928, when he was only 29, he brought out his "Muraqqa-i-Chughtai", an exquisitely illustrated edition of Ghalib’s Urdu Diwan.
Allama Muhammad Iqbal contributed a foreword to the publication in which he described the Muraqqa as "a unique enterprise in modern Indian painting and printing". Iqbal also recorded his belief there-in that with the single exception of Architecture, the Art of Islam is yet to be born-"the art, that is to say, which aims at the human assimilation of Divine attributes (Tukhlaqu Ba Khalaqullah) gives man infinite aspiration (Ajrun Ghair Mamnun) and finally wins for him the status of "God’s representative on earth". Iqbal found in the Muraqqa "indications to show that the young artist of the Punjab is already on the way to feel his responsibility as an artist".
Dr. James H. Cousins, in his introduction to the work, made the acute observation that "the remoteness from so-called realism which Chughtai has deliberately cultivated, will be specially acceptable to those who are now feeling the pull away from an alleged truthfulness to eye sight towards the truth of the imagination".
About Chughtai’s achievement he remarked that "he retains the distinctive mood and posture of the Persian tradition but gives his pictures a special quality of his own, in lovely colour combination, in delicious lines that seem to be less lines of painting than of some inaudible poetry made visible". The folds of drapery appearing in Chughtai’s creations, were characterised by him as a "liturgy of beauty" and his decorative backgrounds based on Saracenic architecture as "calling the imagination away from the tyranny of the actual into free citizenship of the realm of romance.
In his Urdu preface to this work, Chughtai declared that "by its publication he aimed at embodying the soul of Asian civilisation and culture, of which added thereto occurs significant observation that a painting is not a mere representation of the visible phenomena but an interpretation of the painter’s own mind".
It provides a clue to the motifs of Chughtai’s Art. His own personality, enriched with the heritage of Islamic, Iranian and Mughal traditions, finds expression in his individualistic original style. It imports neither a faithful reproduction of nature nor is it imitative of any Western School of Art.
The values of his faith were dear to Chughtai and their spirit is reflected in his chaste passion and artistic restraint in his creative ventures. His orientalism was his pride and his inspiration was in tune with the infinite. He was not merely wrapped up in the past but conjured up past glories to light up the road to the future.
The Muraqqa had a sequel in "Naqsh-i-Chughtai" which includes an additional set of beautiful illustrations of Ghalib’s thought.
As behoved his universalistic Islamic soul, he appreciated manifestations of charm, vitality and dynamism wherever he found them. A collection of his "Indian Paintings" published from Delhi in 1951, relates to the early period of this creative life. In this delightful publication, the Indian motifs that appealed to his sensibility partake of the hue of his ruling passion for beauty and power.
It was in December 1949 that the Pakistan Arts Council, Lahore had given financial aid for this venture to the tune of Rs. 50,000 through the Board for Advancement of Literature, Lahore. This was repaid by the artist in the shape of an adequate number of copies of the work, supplied to the Government. The title of Khan Bahadur was conferred on Chughtai by the British Government in pre-partition times. The Pakistan Government had honoured him with a Hilal-i-Imtiaz.
Chughtai belongs to that band of immortals whose work will endure long after the fashion of hybrid imitative art, popular today with our younger generation, will have passed away. Chughtai was a prolific painter and his creative image gave him little rest right till the end of his life.
His principal medium was water colours in which his work is unsurpassed. He also executed a considerable number of superb etchings, with immaculate skill. If his paintings display an architectonic quality, it is not surprising. That perhaps is a reflex of his ancestral heritage. For, as he himself told, his great grand-father, Baba Saleh, was an architect and his lineage includes the builder of the Taj, the Red Fort and the Badshahi Mosque.
Beside the products of his own creative genius, Chughtai has left behind a unique collection of classical calligraphic inscriptions and a most valuable assemblage of paintings by Eastern and Western masters which could be the pride of a distinctive Art Gallery.
