Drawing in the margins: Altaf's sketches and diaries

The Editorial Team

August 01, 2023

Altaf Mohamedi (1942—2005) was one of the most important political voices in post-independent modern Indian art. He pushed against the complacencies of cultural nation-building that ignored the contemporary realities of the marginalised working classes in India, especially Mumbai, where he hailed from. Educated at London’s Central Saint Martins in the 1960s, he also started keeping a regular diary since then—which opens up the artist’s inner world that was full of doubts, anxieties and despair, while also reflecting a wide variety of influences that he gathered from his political activism, readings and incessant sketches. This article highlights some selections from Altaf’s diaries, relating them to the wealth of sketches that would be made in these pages as well.

Drawing from the Greek word skhedios, meaning ‘to extemporize’, the sketch presents an interiorized, psychological landscape against classical painting’s heroic, externalized construction of the painted tableau. For many artists, sketching and drawing suggest initial explorations for capturing moods, relations and subjectivities that can be expanded through later applications of paint and texture. This has led critics to compare preparatory sketches and drawings made by artists to a ‘private language’ that transports viewers to a different space within the artist’s psyche that is usually invisible in their more public, ‘finished’ or exhibited works.

Writing for a special issue of the journal Master Drawings focusing on mid-century drawings by American modernists, John Elderfield wrote, ‘By 1956, the critic R. P. Blackmur was writing that the modern poet "found himself seeking a private language and has grown proud of it." A similar proud publication of private language characterizes the mid-century artists represented here, and its syntax was that of drawing in reciprocation with painting.’ The comparison with a poet’s process is apt for an artist like Altaf who read widely, including poets like Rainer Maria Rilke, frequently quoting from the latter’s work in his own diaries and sketches. Paul Gauguin’s travel journal, Noa Noa (1893-94), where the artist recorded his impressions of Tahiti, is also referenced by Altaf frequently in his own diaries, setting up a dialogue across time and space between two radical artists who rejected the materialistic world they saw around them.

Altaf

Paul Gauguin

Embracing couple and woman folded in on herself, surrounded by a handwritten text, Album Noa Noa, folio 42 recto

Image courtesy: Wikimedia Commons

24th May 1963 – 23rd March 1964, London

24th May
Everyday I promise myself I shall put a greater effort, but to no avail. Why do I write this? To restore my confidence? To make a confession? I do not know. My work is not good enough. At the age of twenty I should have achieved far more than what I have. My hands, brush and paints, all sometimes work against me. An understanding has to be reached. My mind should be the master of my hands, not vice versa...

I continue to read Gauguin’s Noa Noa. It holds for me a terrific satisfaction. Noa Noa breathes of the soft breeze—the coolness of the place—the man and all he sacrificed for this enchanted island. An island I would exile myself to. But alas! The world is too spoilt by its riches—mentally and spiritually. Had not Gauguin truly found a paradise on earth? Would he have lost himself without it? That’s an abstract question, but well worth reflecting upon. But then, was it not here that he really found his genius? Was it not in Tahiti that he produced most of his masterpieces?

3rd August, 1963

How wonderful the colour ‘black’. It is my saviour, many a times has it heroically come to my rescue. Black, the colour of strength. It is to other colours like a pair of crutches, helping them on their feet, making them twice as effective as they would otherwise be. No other painter has used black so effectively as Georges Rouault. He had full command on it and black, like an obedient slave, slaved gloriously.

15th March
As long as poverty exists I will not know richness,
As long as despair exists I will not know happiness,
As long as prisons exist I will not know freedom…
So ran roughly these beautiful lines in a movie I have just been to see, The Lovely Months of May. It is actually a documentary dealing with the people of France, their opinions, interviews and in fact just a candid report.

How I enjoy such films but would I, if I were caught off-balance by one such roving, private-eye camera? How easy for me as one in an audience to ridicule those people who have already been caught quite off balance. How they stutter and stammer, desperately trying to make sense of their words, to make a dignified escape from the trap they have just fallen into. Of course, there are many who enjoy this—but what of those who do not? In any case the bare truth is that I myself enjoy watching them.

24th March – 22nd May 1964, London

24 March
It is all well to say that India must and has to go a million and one under changes but how? HOW? And that indeed is our big question; How and to this question I have given deep thought.

25 March
Today again I got up late and as usual, did a few sketches. I was in fact thinking of going to the British Museum but put it off as at 3 p.m., the BBC was broadcasting a play which I could not miss...

...at the moment it is neither Elvis nor Frank who are leading the jackpot—it is these four English boys ‘The Beatles’. These chaps, though I confess, I do not like them very much, yet must admit, are really going places. I just heard on the radio that in the U.S.A. the four top songs of the year are by these chaps. Yes, fellows… whatever I think of you I must tip my hat at your unbelievable success. I really cannot understand this—they are so ordinary and childish, their sense of humour is almost to the point of stupidity—their singing, so ordinary, their personality—putting four together adds to ½ a Frank and a ¾ Elvis. But yet! ... well, this good world of ours is full of surprises, and if I may say so, is all the better for it too.

Bridget Riley

Descending

1965

Image courtesy: Wikimedia Commons

1st April
I went to the Whitechapel Art Gallery at 10:30 and saw a large notice ‘Opens 11 a.m’. So I decided to have a cuppa at the nearby Wimpy’s. When I returned to the Art Gallery at 11.10, it was yet closed with a good crowd waiting impatiently. The exhibition ‘The New Generation’ had twelve artists exhibiting, all under 30. Among whom were already a few who had made a name for themselves like Paul Huxley, Derek Boshier, Alan Jones, David Hockney, Bridget Riley. The exhibition at last opened at 11: 30 and as we entered what do we find, most of these twelve painters sat there chatting...

Next, I went to the bookstall, which mainly deals with communism and there bought, Selected Writings of Marx and The Marxists and lastly went to Collets from where I bought The Literary Critics, A Short History of French Literature and A Short History of English Literature. When I came back to my room, my hands full and happy, it was almost five in the evening.

22nd January 1966 – 17th January 1967 London / Europe

22nd January
These lonely weekends are tremendously good for me in that they are greatly creative. Today, and yesterday, I completed two works and my large painting is coming off rather well. If only I could give myself more often to such work it would almost be enough but these erratic bursts with which I work is far too unsatisfactory. Completed Brecht’s Messingkauf Dialogues.

4th February
Last Thursday, I saw Shakespeare Wallah, an Indian film, directed by an American. This film, greatly praised by all the critics, disappointed me slightly but only slightly. The view of Indian society depicted was all too sadly true and it is such films that we need to wake us up.

Egon Schiele

Image courtesy: Wikimedia Commons

10 June 1964
[Andre] Gide speaks with my voice. I am not a virgin, true, but almost one. For to rid myself of ever growing frustration of passion I have lent myself, to relationships for sex. But is that not only an escape? At least so it seems, for the frustration yet sticks to my mind, to my body, and an ache overcomes me. The only cure seems to be love. True love. But then what indeed is true love?

13 October
...we visited the Marlborough Art Gallery, which exhibited the works of an Austrian painter—Egon Schiele. This painter lived during the years of the First World War, and I call him ‘young’ for he died young. Committed suicide. It is long since I have showed an over enthusiasm for an exhibition, but Schiele surely aroused my emotions. This young painter had an unbelievably intimate relationship with form and colour. True, his work shows an influence of both Modigliani and Soutine—to a lesser extent, both who are limited to their own style; but Schiele experiments tirelessly. What really enthralled me were his drawings—very subtle yet so strong and imposing.

3rd May, 1973:
In our bourgeois world today, where class struggles have become more intense – art tends to be divorced from social ideas, which drives the individual still further into his desperate alienation, to encourage an impotent egoism and turns reality into a false myth.

18th May:
A work of art is not the result of a series of conquests – it is the result of something far more difficult – of finding a direct, logical, firm route through a landscape cluttered with every conceivable kind of bolder, barrier and obstacle. The artist should make a maze seem a highway.