Untitled

It is interesting to correlate the work of an artist with the time he was spending as a man of the world when creating those works. Altaf was a young art student in London when he made this Untitled work. And in the month of October in the year 1963, the date inscribed in the work, he was penniless, devoid of inspiration and buried in reading, according to the journals that he maintained during that period. The sureness of the blue strokes, however, belie the fact. Instead, they are evocative of the clarity of abstraction in the mind of the young artist who would go on to make a place for himself in Indian modernism with his incisive, pithy art sensitive towards the plight of the dispossessed.