Marking a centenary: 100 years of Shakir Ali

NCA hosts exhibition to honour first principal

LAHORE:

An exhibition to honour Shakir Ali, the first principal of National College Arts, was inaugurated at Zahoor-ul-Ikhlaq Gallery on Monday. More than 40 letters written by and to Ali, while he was the principal of NCA, are also displayed at the gallery. The exhibition has been organised to mark what would have been the artist’s 100th birthday.

Principal Murtaza Jafri told The Express Tribune that Shakir Ali was appointed the first principal of NCA in 1958. He remained the principal till 1974. The college was previously called the Mayo School of Industrial Arts and was established in 1875 and named in honour of the assassinated British viceroy of India Lord Mayo.

Jafri said Ali was a pillar of modern trends in painting and an innovator in using modern technique to portray Pakistani themes.

Ali could be called the founder of the Pakistani school of painting. “Ali indigenised the western style of painting to portray our own culture…that is a huge contribution.”

Most of the contemporary art works today have been inspired by the style of painting he introduced in Pakistan, Jafri said. “The exhibition has been organised for students to learn about the depth in Ali’s work, his ideology as an artist, public views and the way he operated as a principal and a teacher at the institute even though he was one of the most recognised artists of his time,” Jafri said.

Professor Quddus Mirza, head of the Fine Arts Department at NCA, said Ali was an artist, art educator, fiction writer and a politically active individual.

Mirza said Shakir Ali’s three-year stint as a student in Czechoslovakia in 1949 can be considered significant in shaping his aesthetics and technique. His arrival in Lahore is now seen as a significant turning point in history of Pakistani art, he said.

“Along with Zubeda Agha, he is regarded as an exponent of modernism in Pakistan and his close association with his contemporaries  - now referred to as the Lahore Art Circle –  was instrumental in exploring new ways of seeing and saying,” Mirza said.

He was also in close contact with writers and poets of that time and he associated himself with a group of young artists who were dealing with issues of formalism and representation in visual arts without negating tradition, Mirza said.

Shakir Ali’s primary education in arts began at the JJ School of Art in Bombay in 1938. He left for England’s Slade School of Art in 1946.

Published in The Express Tribune, March 8^th, 2016.