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Lot Essay
Born in Simla in 1928, Anwar Jalal Shemza was initially a student of philosophy and languages including Arabic and Persian before he joined the Mayo School of Arts (now the National College of Arts), Lahore in 1944 to study painting. Following his graduation in 1947, a few months before the Indian Subcontinent was divided under Partition, the artist established a graphic design studio and taught art at a few institutions. A significant contributor to the city’s cultural life in the early 1950s, and a champion of modernism in the art and literature of the new nation of Pakistan, Shemza was a founding member of the Lahore Art Circle, a group that advocated for abstraction of forms in painting. He also wrote several Urdu novels and plays and edited the literary journal Ehsas.
There is very little work available from the artist’s Lahore years, before Shemza travelled to the United Kingdom in the autumn of 1956. However, in one of his earliest monographs, A.M. Ahmed describes Shemza’s evolution towards a non-naturalistic aesthetic embracing abstraction as a creative force in art. He notes, “During all this time he [Shemza] continued his search for the ‘significant’. The artist takes his knowledge from the realistic world but does not record events or actual fact. He does not copy nature […] The true artist recreates. His sensitive soul and poetic vision urges him to express himself and thus he communicates his feelings and experiences” (A.M. Ahmed, A.J. Shemza, Lahore, 1956, unpaginated).
Untitled (Couple), painted in 1952, is one of Shemza’s earliest works to come to auction, and part of a small body of work on the subject of lovers, two of which, The Couple and The Kiss, were exhibited in 1956 at the Punjab University, Lahore, shortly before Shemza emigrated to the United Kingdom. Here the artist presents two intertwined figures, one in profile, the other from the front. They are rendered in a flattened, abstracted style reminiscent of Pablo Picasso’s Cubist paintings, which is almost unrecognizable to viewers more familiar with the geometric and calligraphic works Shemza began painting in the 1960s. The sensitivity with which the artist has portrayed the loving embrace between the two figures in this work illustrates a completely different aspect of Shemza’s oeuvre, and the discovery of this painting adds greatly to our understanding of the evolution of his creative practice.
There is very little work available from the artist’s Lahore years, before Shemza travelled to the United Kingdom in the autumn of 1956. However, in one of his earliest monographs, A.M. Ahmed describes Shemza’s evolution towards a non-naturalistic aesthetic embracing abstraction as a creative force in art. He notes, “During all this time he [Shemza] continued his search for the ‘significant’. The artist takes his knowledge from the realistic world but does not record events or actual fact. He does not copy nature […] The true artist recreates. His sensitive soul and poetic vision urges him to express himself and thus he communicates his feelings and experiences” (A.M. Ahmed, A.J. Shemza, Lahore, 1956, unpaginated).
Untitled (Couple), painted in 1952, is one of Shemza’s earliest works to come to auction, and part of a small body of work on the subject of lovers, two of which, The Couple and The Kiss, were exhibited in 1956 at the Punjab University, Lahore, shortly before Shemza emigrated to the United Kingdom. Here the artist presents two intertwined figures, one in profile, the other from the front. They are rendered in a flattened, abstracted style reminiscent of Pablo Picasso’s Cubist paintings, which is almost unrecognizable to viewers more familiar with the geometric and calligraphic works Shemza began painting in the 1960s. The sensitivity with which the artist has portrayed the loving embrace between the two figures in this work illustrates a completely different aspect of Shemza’s oeuvre, and the discovery of this painting adds greatly to our understanding of the evolution of his creative practice.