Biography
An important modernist, Anwar Jalal Shemza represents a generation of artists who emerged in the wake of the decolonisation of Asia and Africa. His art can be productively juxtaposed alongside other artists from South Asia, the Middle East, and North Africa who deployed Arabic calligraphic motifs in entirely new ways from the mid-1950s onwards.
Born in Simla, India, in 1928 to a Kashmiri and Punjabi family who owned a carpet and military embroidery business in Ludhiana, Shemza attended high school in Lahore. After a year at university reading philosophy, Persian, and Arabic in 1944, he joined the Mayo School of Arts, Lahore. Upon graduation in 1947, he set up a design studio in the city. That same year, the partition of colonial India into the postcolonial states of India and Pakistan saw the killing of many of Shemza’s family members. This traumatic experience marked his subsequent formation.
During the late 1940s through the mid-1950s in Lahore, Shemza became associated with the Urdu literary intelligentsia and wrote several novels and radio plays. This exposure to literary and artistic debates can be seen in his later work in response to the writings of Rainer Maria Rilke and the art of Paul Klee, his embrace of modernism as praxis in a highly disciplined and rigorous fashion, and most significantly, in the role played by textuality and Lettrism in the construction of history and memory in his works. Shemza was also a founder of the Lahore Art Circle, an influential group of young artists whose founding members included Shakir Ali, Ali Imam, Moyene Najmi, Ahmed Pervez, and Sheikh Safdar, and who experimented with modernism and abstraction during the early and mid-1950s.
In 1956 Shemza moved to London to study at the Slade School of Fine Art, part of a generation of artists and intellectuals from nations that had recently gained independence from the British Empire. Upon arrival at the Slade, Shemza suffered an existential crisis, which he lucidly summarised in a statement written in 1963, which is prescient in articulating the exilic dilemmas of many other diaspora artists since. Especially devastating for him was how the distinguished art historian Ernst Gombrich regarded the art of the non-West. “One evening, when I was attending a Slade weekly lecture on the history of art, professor Gombrich came to the chapter on Islamic Art – an art which was ‘functional’ [according to Gombrich] …. [Later that day] I destroyed paintings, drawings, everything that could be called ‘art.’… All day restlessness sent me from place to place, until I found myself in the Egyptian Section at the British Museum. … No longer was the answer simply to begin again; the search was for my own identity. Who was I? … I was an exile, homeless, without a name.”
Shemza’s existential crisis was artistic as well as personal. As exhilarating as London was as a city, it was also a profoundly alienating place. During the Slade years (1956–1960), Paul Klee’s art – characterised by surface as the plane of modernist experimentation and the freedom and ability to deploy abstraction, geometry, and pattern — much of it derived from Islamic art, became essential for his later development. Shemza began to make work based on his own lived and studied knowledge and experience — of carpet patterns, calligraphic forms, and Mughal architecture of Lahore.
Shemza met Mary Taylor in 1957, and they married soon afterwards. The family settled permanently in England in 1961, living in the Midlands where they would be close to Mary’s parents. He showed extensively in the UK, Pakistan, and internationally in solo and group exhibitions, but his diasporic existence was an immanent and unending condition until his untimely death in 1985. From the mid-1950s to the mid-1960s, London was an important centre for artists of diverse backgrounds making and exhibiting innovative work. While the work of many modern artists from formally colonized regions was being subsumed and even contained under the “commonwealth” rubric, this term also provided exhibition opportunities.
Shemza investigated the relation between visual and textual practice in his modernist compositions, referencing predominantly Islamic visual motifs and calligraphic forms. He repeatedly explored several motifs — city walls and architecture, electronic circuit boards, chess motifs, the letter meem (the first letter in the name of the Prophet Muhammad), and others. Experimenting with innovative technical procedures, he introduced references to fabrics, textiles, and textures in numerous works. He distilled his experiences into a disciplined formalist practice, much of it based on geometric forms that would provide him with a set of finite yet flexible building blocks. Much of Shemza’s midcareer work has been seen with reference to the plastic manipulation of the circle and the square that is reminiscent of the letters B and D in the Latin alphabet. However, the calligraphic dimensions in many series, especially Roots, draw from the sinuous lines of the Arabic alphabet and thus venture far beyond rigid geometric abstraction, creating tension between the two scripts.
The Roots series was his last major project, executed from 1977 until his death. Structurally, these works often delineate an imagined foliate form on the upper half of the picture, while the lower half depicts root forms. These works relay the anguish of diasporic experience in a formally restrained language based on calligraphy and ornamental designs inspired by oriental carpets and textiles, perhaps a memory of his family’s carpet business in pre-Partition South Asia. Made in a small format, their moveable character recalls works by other artists who have grappled with the portability of artistic form regarding exile and diaspora. The Roots series brings the relays between ornament and modernism to the point of crisis, especially about modernism’s intimate yet unacknowledged reliance on the arts of the non-Western world by major Western institutions until recently. Moreover, the roots of the plant forms in Shemza’s compositions are textual and lettrist, suggesting that a return to one’s roots can no longer be based on a blood-and-soil or nationalist affiliation but that instead, the roots themselves have now become transnational in their historical and contemporary valences.
