everal writers have, off and on, published reviews, comments and full scale studies on the work of visual artists. Two French authors, Charles Baudelaire and Guillaume Apollinaire, wrote extensively on art and artists. Norwegian novelist Karl Ove Knausgaard authored So Much Longing in So Little Space, an exclusive publication about Edvard Munch. Poet Octavio Paz, a Nobel laureate, has a book called Essays on Mexican Art to his credit. Not long ago French poet Yves Bonnefoy’s writings on art were compiled and translated into English as Searching for Present. In 2015, essays on art by Julian Barnes, the English fiction writer, appeared in the volume, Keeping an Eye Open (updated in 2020).Urdu writer Sheen Farrukh also had a novel-like/ -length book Madaar, around the life of Ali Imam.

Apart from these publications, writers contribute short texts on art and artists to newspapers, magazines and catalogues. In Urdu they have included Faiz Ahmed Faiz, Quratulain Hyder, Intezar Hussain and Shafi Aqeel. Writing of this kind is generally different from reviews by other art critics or historians because here a creative individual reflects upon practice of someone else in a different format. Another quality that elevates these texts above usual writings on art is that these scribes are known, respected and admired for their skill, grip and ingenuity with words.

On the other side, visual artists have portrayed writers in their drawings, paintings and sculptures. The fame, following and audience of a writer often is far larger than that of an image maker. Every school-going child studies language and literature, and gets introduced to works of fiction, poetry and prose. People read, recite or sing poems for pleasure. Thus it is more probable that the visual artists’ awareness of authors of their times or from the past is wider compared to a writer’s knowledge of pictorial expressions. In societies like Pakistan, poets are often better recognised than painters and other practitioners of art.

Writers are often represented in works of art. AR Chughtai, a writer of short fiction and prose on the side, painted a delicate portrait of Allama Iqbal – an extension of his watercolours on the verses of the poet. Chughtai’s portrayal of Iqbal is distinct from other artists who attempted the same subject. Since Chughtai was friends with literary figures of his era, and attended their meetings, he depicted Iqbal more as a poet than an embodiment of nationalism.

Allama Iqbal has been regularly rendered by artists of the Islamic Republic. In 1982, an exhibition on Iqbal was opened at the National College of Arts, in which students and faculty participated. In our government schools and state organisations, competitions are frequently held in drawing the national poet’s portrait. Saeed Akhtar, the celebrated artist (more famous for his canvases of the Quaid-i-Azam) has painted Allama Iqbal for similar reasons. He has also produced a number of portraits of contemporary writers who posed for him. These included the poet Salahuddin Mehmood (1984) and travel- and fiction-writer Mustansar Hussain Tarar (1991).

Saeed Akhtar also produced a remarkable portrait of Faiz Ahmed Faiz in 1990 (six years after the poet’s death). The flow of lines, the glow of tawny hues and the likeness of the great bard captured in a few marks turned it into a painter’s tribute. Other artists (including Ali Imam) in painting Faiz’s portraiture paid homage to the creator of magnificent verses. Usually when an artist represents a writer, whether through his/ her features or literature, it’s a form of tribute. Sadequain sketched remarkable drawings of Faiz Ahmed Faiz and Hafiz Hoshiarpuri. He also depicted Iqbal’s face as well as his poems, and a series of visuals highlighting the poet’s ideas.

Sadequain, while living in Paris, made lithographs based on Albert Camus’s The Stranger. These were added as illustrations inthe French novel’s 1966 edition. One of the reasons that the artist remained attached to literature and literary figures, was being a poet himself. Aslam Kamal too drew images of Iqbal and Faiz, and provided illustrations for Faiz’s collected poems.

At one point in our cultural past, the exchange between writers and artists (particularly of the Lahore Art Circle) was consistent, meaningful and fruitful for both disciplines, mainly because some of these creative individuals were inspired from the European art and literary movements of that period. Ozzir Zuby, a member of Lahore Art Circle, sculpted faces of his contemporary writers including Faiz, Mumtaz Mufti and Ashfaq Ahmed. Anna Molka Ahmed created statues of poets Sufi Tabassum and Faiz.

In the Western art, these links are more complex, ingrained and prolonged. Impressionist painters interacted with writers on various levels, i.e., they were personal friends, professional colleagues, coffeehouse companions or brothers-in-arms against an old and crumbling order. Emile Zola’s novel L’Oeuvre (The Masterpiece) is a fictional account of his friendship with Paul Cezanne. The book annoyed the French painter, although he made the writer’s portrait with pencil in 1885, a year before the novel was printed. In 1868, Edouard Manet painted Emile Zola in his studio, sitting on a couch next to books, including a slim catalogue of the painter’s exhibition (originally, Zola’s article in defence of Manet’s art in 1866; in which he“regarded the artist, who was contested by traditionalists, as one of the masters of the future, whose place was in the Louvre.”)

Auguste Rodin portrayed several writers in three-dimensions. This included a full figure of Honore de Balzac. The Impressionist sculptor captured the character of the writer almost half a century later for this monumental (93 feet high) sculpture, erected in Paris in 1939 on the Boulevard Raspail. In the words of Kenneth Clark it is “the greatest piece of sculpture of the Nineteenth Century; – perhaps indeed since Michelangelo.”

Whether an outcome of a relationship during an author’s life, or with his/ her legacy, the portrait of a writer is often different from depictions of other people. It is not merely about the face or features, neither the likeness (Balzac’s statute commissioned by the French Society of Letters in 1891was rejected by it when a full-size plaster model was displayed in 1898, because it “ignored the requirement for a realistic portrait”); it contains the writer’s long lasting voice (manifested in words) which engulfs the mortal body. When looking at these you notice the travellers of time and space; the exiled souls. Artists identified with this aspect of writers being outsiders.

One of the best representations is a David Hockney drawing of British American poet WH Auden from 1968. Sitting, with a cigarette in his fingers emitting smoke, dishevelled hair, looking ahead – or inside, through his half closed eyes, the poet is rendered in a few, quick, but careful and caring lines that communicate the sense of solitude and the state of otherness every writer encounters. Especially Auden, who penned the verses: Say this city has ten million souls/ Some are living in mansions, some are living in holes:/ Yet there’s no place for us, my dear, yet there’s no place for us.

The writer is an art critic, a curator and a professor at the School of Visual Arts and Design, at the Beaconhouse National University, Lahore