It might (read: must) surprise you that I was a bit of a geek growing up. One of my more peculiar habits was to dream up elaborate birthday celebrations for famous people, most of whom had long since died and were therefore unlikely to care about my arrangements. Nevertheless, I went ahead with my party plans. I had a heavy encyclopedia back then (“Kids, think Wikipedia on paper…”) and I would mark out the birthdays/death-days of famous people and write them down in my calendar. Just like that a mundane Monday in DHA Lahore could be turned into the day that Calligula was born, or a frantic Friday could take on ominous qualities because it was the day Mata Hari died many years before. It’s weird, I know, but that’s how I rolled.
Now, as you might remember from my previous columns, my house is currently a construction site on the scale and order of Chernobyl, but one of the advantages to having everything upturned in your life is that you can see all the stuff that’s been hiding away for years. I found one of my old diaries, and sure enough it contained a scribble of dates denoting the birthdays of long-forgotten icons. This week, for example, is the birthday of my favorite artist of all time, a man called Henri Marie Raymond de Toulouse Lautrec, aka Henri Tolouse-Lautrec. He was an aristocratic Frenchman with growth problems. A series of illnesses ensured that his legs never grew, leaving him in a stunted physical state not dissimilar to Dwarfism. Unable to go out and play, young Henri immersed himself in sketching. He was always a bit of an outsider, as you can imagine. Pained and restless, he left the grandeur of his family estate to go and live in the scandalous Montmartre district of Paris in the late 1800s, an area that was famous for its prostitutes, its absinthe and the rowdy Moulin Rouge.
Toulouse-Lautrec's people are exuberant, raucous, depressive, horny, loving, kind, and wasted in the grandest sense of the word
Lautrec was a master draftsman (he could draw a triple chin with scarcely a squiggle) but it was his agile, frolicsome way with paint that allowed him to capture the debauched fun of life in Montmartre. His interest was rare, focused as it was on the most overlooked segments of society, those who were rarely depicted in art, i.e. the poor and powerless. He portrayed them without sentimentality, without having to dress them up as something else, something more “respectable”. In his pictures, which now hang in the great museums of the world, people are as people were in a French fin de siecle nightclub: exuberant, raucous, depressive, horny, loving, kind, and wasted in the grandest sense of the word. Many of his models were prostitutes, some of whom are famous now simply for having been painted by several great artists. (Most of the world’s major museums are homages to prostitutes through the ages, which, if you think about it, is a marvelous comment on the nature of human civilization.)
The French are obviously doing a major thing for Toulouse’s birthday. He’s become a bit of a stereotype now when it comes to the Bohemians of Paris. His short form, as it were, has been characterized in countless movies, including Baz Luhrman’s maddened ‘Moulin Rouge’. Posters of his work are staples in college dorms and cafés around the world.
Zain-ul-Abedin self portrait
I, too, had Toulouse’s posters up in my dormitory. But as I searched for them on his birthday last week, I chanced upon the work of another artist, something my father had given me recently: a folio of prints of the Begali artist Zainul Abedin. As I discovered after reading the accompanying essay, this year marks 100 years since the birth of Mr. Abedin. Sadly, it isn’t likely to be celebrated here with anything like a pageant. Born in 1914 and a prolific artist, Abedin’s work is considered to be the source of the famous “Bengali Style” of painting, which in turn played an important part in creating the modern “national” styles of Indian painting.
The folio I found has some twelve prints of Abedin’s Famine series, which he made after witnessing the Bengal Famine of 1942 firsthand. Drawn roughly with diluted charcoal on regular packing paper, the images became instantly iconic, not because they were documentary, through they are that, nor because they were savagely depressing, though they are that too. These works are arresting because the artist managed, in the economy of a few strokes, to capture the deep, sinister clutch of human failure in the modern world, of people dying because of an utterly preventable lack of food.
The figures are skeletal, stark, and wraith-like. Their limbs jut out awkwardly, like shards, hunger having sharpened all their rounded edges. The series came to stand for the eradication of hunger, for a mid-century vision of Human Suffering. It’s rare that an artist gets that kind of global recognition for his work.
Abedin was born in India, lived in Pakistan and died in Bangladesh, and so in a strange way all of South Asia has a claim on him. While he is championed in Bengal for his politics, he is ignored in our country (probably also for his politics), although the internet informs me that a crater on Mercury is named after Zainul Abedin. (I’m not sure if that’s a nice thing.)
Lautrec is currently one of the most famous artists who lives. Zainul Abedin is not. I think we know that that has less to do with what they did, than with those who remembered what they did.
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