36 | Afterall
Nasreen Mohamedi,
Untitled, 1970s,
graphite and ink
Making the Maximum of the Minimum:
A Close Reading of Nasreen Mohamedi
— Anders Kreuger
on paper, 19 × 19cm,
detail. Courtesy of
Talwar Gallery,
New York and New Delhi
We miss Her, not because We see —
The Absence of an Eye —
Except its Mind accompany
Abridge Society
As slightly as the Route of Stars —
Ourselves — asleep below —
We know that their superior Eyes
Include Us — as they go —
— Emily Dickinson 1
It is, I feel, appropriate to enlist Emily Dickinson’s poetry for my attempt to read and
understand Nasreen Mohamedi’s images. This poem, which almost becomes a prophetic
epitaph for the artist and the superior images she left behind, was probably written in
1865. It appears as number 993 in the list of the poet’s 1,775 known works.
Some of the biographical facts about American poet Emily Dickinson (1830—1886)
and Indian artist Nasreen Mohamedi (1937—1990) converge. Both were born to affluent
parents and lived surrounded by extended families. Both led inner lives first and
foremost. Both died in their mid-fifties, unmarried and without children. Less superficial
similarities between them also exist. As artists they both were uncompromisingly
devoted to the growth of their art and self-consciously aware of its exceptional quality.
Their works are elliptical and reductive, but at the same time dynamic and opulent.
Mohamedi expressly sought to make ‘the maximum of the minimum’ by employing a
limited repertoire of straight and curved lines on paper. The same is true of Dickinson,
who narrowed down her lexicon to a finite set of plain-looking words tested by intense
poetic experience.
Significant divergences between these two remarkable women are just as easy to
identify. Dickinson never published in her lifetime; her poetry remained secret even
to those closest to her. Mohamedi, on the other hand, was an acknowledged and muchappreciated professional artist and pedagogue. Dickinson remained attached to her
native Amherst, Massachusetts, and never strayed further than Washington, where
her father was a congressman. Mohamedi, whose father was in business, was educated
abroad, travelled widely and lived in cosmopolitan cities. Dickinson occupies a secure
position inside the ‘universal’ (read: Western) Modernist canon, whereas Mohamedi is
being repeatedly rediscovered as a surprisingly ‘Westernised’ (read: universally likeable)
outsider from the Indian subcontinent.
I have no evidence that Nasreen Mohamedi studied Emily Dickinson’s poetry,
and perhaps this is even beside the point. I will not try to prove any connection. Instead
I will use the poems as infrastructure, as a power grid to support an exploration of
selected images.
1
Emily Dickinson, ‘Poem no.993’ (c.1865), The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson (ed. Thomas
J. Johnson), New York, Boston and London: Little, Brown and Company, 1960, p.462.
Nasreen Mohamedi | 37
Me, change! Me, alter!
Then I will, when on Everlasting Hill
A smaller Purple grows —
At sunset, or a lesser glow
Flickers upon Cordillera —
At Day’s superior close! 2
Who was Nasreen Mohamedi? Pinpointing her in space and time is legitimate, since it
will allow us to go from a general appreciation of her work to the specific knowledge we
need to situate its originality. She was born in 1937 in Karachi (then in British India, now
in Pakistan) as the seventh child to Ashraf Mohamedi, a Muslim merchant, and his wife
Zeynab, who died in 1942 when Mohamedi was only five years old. Those of her biographers who knew her personally have described this loss as a formative trauma. 3 She was
educated at St Martin’s School of Art in London in 1954—57, and then stayed with her
family in the Gulf state of Bahrain until 1958, when she moved to Mumbai. In 1961
she had her first solo exhibition there. In 1961—63 she continued her studies in Paris.
She was going to get married in 1963, but the engagement was broken off.
Another significant loss. Art historian Geeta Kapur writes: ‘Nasreen identified with
the body of the beloved, evacuating it of every symbolic truth except a deeply embedded
narcissism.’ 4 Does not Dickinson’s poetry from her most productive years in the early
1860s illustrate a similar mental state? Dickinson writes of ‘Martyr Painters’ who
‘never spoke’, and ‘a Death blow’ that ‘is a Life Blow to Some’. 5
In 1968 Mohamedi travelled to Iran and Turkey. Later, in 1981, she also went
to Japan, and she visited Europe and America a number of times. In 1970 she moved
from Mumbai to Delhi. In the 1970s and 80s she taught at the renowned art academy
in Baroda. Afflicted by Parkinson’s disease, she became more and more reclusive and
spent much time in her family’s house at Kihim on the Arabian Sea, just south of
Mumbai. She died there in 1990.
I clutched at sounds —
I groped at shapes —
I touched the tops of Films —
I felt the Wilderness roll back
Along my Golden lines —
The Sackcloth — hangs upon the nail —
The Frock I used to wear —
But where my moment of brocade —
My — drop — of India? 6
Nasreen Mohamedi’s paintings, watercolours and drawings from the 1960s
demonstrate her perceptive force and sense of visual economy, but they are still
somewhat conventional in their delicate restraint. In retrospect, we interpret her
muffled ink-and-turpentine washes and the controlled inflections of her pen as hints
of things to come, but they do not quite prepare us for her later work at the drawing
board. I will begin with an image at the intersection of these two periods: both freeflowing ink painting and incisive diagrammatic drawing. All Mohamedi’s mature
works are untitled and undated — as if asking to be numbered, like Emily Dickinson’s
poems. But before I address the image directly, one more contextual hurdle needs to
be jumped. What about the ‘Indianness’ of Nasreen Mohamedi’s art? Where is the
silver foil, the golden thread, the brocade? Is it fair to describe her pared-down visuality
as ‘un-Indian’? Could it not just as credibly be labelled ‘Oriental’ and traced back to
Sufi and Zen sensibilities, which we know influenced her? 7
Mohamedi has been juxtaposed with Agnes Martin — in writing by Geeta Kapur
and on olive green walls by Roger M. Buergel and Ruth Noack 8 — but I am not convinced
that the comparison does justice to either of the artists. It comes across as too much
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
E. Dickinson, ‘Poem no.268’ (c.1861), The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, op. cit., p.122.
See, particularly, Altaf (ed.), Nasreen in Retrospect, Mumbai: Ashraf Mohamedi Trust, 1995.
Geeta Kapur, ‘Elegy for an Unclaimed Beloved’, When Was Modernism, New Delhi: Tulika Books, 2000,
pp.64—65. Emphasis the author’s.
Respectively, E. Dickinson, ‘Poem no.544’ (c.1862) and ‘Poem no.816’ (c.1864), The Complete Poems
of Emily Dickinson, op. cit., pp.265 and 397.
E. Dickinson, ‘Poem no.430’ (c.1862), The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, op. cit., p.206.
See Yashodhara Dalmia, ‘Nasreen: Mutating Chaos’, in Nasreen Mohamedi. Collected Works (exh. cat.),
Mumbai: Chatterjee & Lal, 2004, p.2.
See, respectively, G. Kapur, ‘Elegy for an Unclaimed Beloved’, op. cit., pp.73—77; and Documenta Kassel
16/06—23/09 2007 (exh. cat.), Cologne: Taschen, 2007, p.113.
38 | Afterall
of a strategic move: an attempt to claim a place for an Indian in a canon that operates
through recognition, in the literal sense of what Western audiences recognise as similar
to what they already know. I would even interpret this as ‘re-colonising’ a comparatively
unknown artist. Yet Mohamedi was fully capable of using the colonisers’ discourse
herself, bending it to meet the inner needs of her art.
Just look at her recently exhibited pocket diaries, with their aphoristic entries
in English and their leisurely days and hours aristocratically blotted out in ink. On
Wednesday 16 May of an unnamed year she writes ‘hypnotic contrasting rhythms’,
and then proceeds to visually re-edit the entire two-week spread into an illustration of
this note. On her diary pages Mohamedi stands in rebellious solitary defiance of linear
calendar time and its anchorage in the epicentre of imperial domination — the Greenwich
meridian. She reminds the reader and viewer (herself) that, whatever happens, she will
remain in charge of her own presence in culture, space and time. ‘Be gentle but firm.’
The resemblance between Mohamedi’s and Martin’s visual concentration is not,
I think, an example of the ‘non-sensuous similarity’ on which Walter Benjamin based
his description of mimesis — a mental process increasingly dependent on a systemic
intermediary, i.e. language.9 But is the parallel between Mohamedi and Martin
even meaningful in a sensuous sense? Do their works show similarities on the infraintellectual and supra-intellectual levels that ultimately decide our understanding of
an artist’s personality? I find it difficult, if not impossible, to overlook the difference
in tone and touch between these two artists. Therefore, and for more political reasons
already given, I prefer to enjoy them separately.
Now back to the first image. Its method is one of a muted clash between levels
of perception. On a strictly two-dimensional level there is rhythmic calculation:
the unevenly spaced horizontal parallels and the shorter diagonal ‘levers’ making
connections between them that would usually be impossible. There is also a purposeful
rudimentary three-dimensional level, where linear tricks create contradictions that
cause the viewer to twist the surface into illusions of movement and distance. Yet the
viewing experience begins and ends on a level of almost overbearing tonal excess.
At first the brownish-grey wash appears to be smudging the drawing and dulling it
down. If we force our gaze to linger for a moment, we witness how the film of diluted ink
transforms the linear composition from painted-over diagram into ‘under-painting’:
a skeleton that holds a fluid skin.
Low at my problem bending,
Another problem comes —
Larger than mine — Serener —
Involving statelier sums.
I check my busy pencil,
My figures file away.
Wherefore, my baffled fingers
Thy perplexity? 10
Mohamedi was to leave such double understanding behind her and put her trust in the
accuracy and accountability of the line. Her key works on paper were produced from the
late 1970s to the mid-80s, and are now attracting renewed interest, after being exhibited
at the Drawing Center in New York in 2005 and at documenta 12 in Kassel in 2007. 11
I move on to another work from this period. Like the discreet connecting devices
in the image just discussed, it shows that diagonals do not always mean what we expect
them to mean. Diagonals were often banned from systematised versions of abstract
20th-century art. A classic example is the rectilinear universe of Piet Mondrian. Purists
of different hues have considered diagonals too illustrative, too indicative of movement
and direction and mood. Yes, they do have a tendency to be ‘sharp’ or ‘blunt’, to go ‘up’
or ‘down’, to point ‘left’ or ‘right’. But the diagonals that Mohamedi sets in motion across
a modest sheet of paper defy such allegorical explications.
The construction of this particular image looks clear at first. The lines seem to
radiate over the paper in a predetermined pattern adding up to a legible statement.
But in Mohamedi’s linear drawings everything must be checked and double-checked.
We should never be too certain that we have grasped the message she conveys and the
9
10
11
‘Thus the coherence of words or sentences is the bearer through which, like a flash, similarity appears.’
Walter Benjamin, ‘On the Mimetic Faculty’, One-Way Street (trans. Edmund Jephcott and Kingsley
Shorter), London and New York: Verso, 1979, p.162.
E. Dickinson, ‘Poem no.69’ (c.1859), The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, op. cit., p.36.
The exhibition at the Drawing Center was titled ‘Nasreen Mohamedi: Lines Among Lines’.
Nasreen Mohamedi | 39
40 | Afterall
Nasreen Mohamedi,
Untitled, n.d.,
diary page, ink on paper,
8.9 × 13cm
Untitled, n.d.,
diary page, ink
on paper, 10.1 × 14.6cm.
All images courtesy
of Talwar Gallery,
New York and New Delhi
logic she employs. These diagonals describe an uneasily sloping rhythmical movement
through space, or a dimension that might be spatial but is not necessarily so. If there
is a grid, and this is a matter of definition more than of intuition, it is composed of two
mutually incompatible series. We find a succession of vertical lines whose intervals
become narrower if we proceed from left to right. We also find a rush of variously tilted
and stressed diagonals that dutifully cross the verticals but also perform a handful of
other functions. They form their own series, falling in and out of pace with each other,
attempting to link up but not quite succeeding before they are truncated when the paper
ends. In a triumphant gesture towards the stiff verticals, three clusters of parallel
diagonals burst in from the left, but they peter out before having reached across the
paper. If we must, we can read them as consecutive horizons existing in an otherwise
invisible curved space.
Mohamedi sows doubt in the viewer. Is this a diagram modified for pictorial
purposes or a picture broken down into diagrammatic building blocks? Yet nothing
in this ambiguous geometry is outside her command. This is not a line-up of pencil
marks marching towards their grammatically correct destiny, but rather the visual
equivalent of a philosophical poem that disobeys rules. The image is drawn, not
generated. Everything is here because the hand of the artist put it in exactly this order,
for a purpose that means something. Mohamedi, low at her drawing-board, did not
yield to the temptation of inventing some vertical/diagonal rule and then ‘implementing’
it. The problems coming at her were larger than that; they were individual and therefore
had to be individually solved.
To fill a Gap
Insert the Thing that caused it —
Block it up
With Other — and ’twill yawn the more —
You cannot solder an Abyss
With Air. 12
The next image I have chosen for scrutiny is more abstract but also more pictorial.
We have already learnt that Mohamedi’s drawings are not what they first appear to
be. They are not ‘minimalist’. That would not square with her goal of achieving the
maximum. Nor are they ‘constructivist’. They are thought-processes rather than
foregone conclusions. On the other hand, to call her drawings ‘metaphorical’ or
‘associative’ would be to underestimate how dependent they are on methodological
deliberations, such as the sudden appearance of diagonals or curves in an otherwise
rectilinear microcosm. And ‘poetic’ is an unfortunate epithet whenever visuality is
at stake, since it is so often used to cover up a soft-edged lack of identifiable meaning.
Mohamedi stretches the field of drawing towards its inner limits and cultivates
it on its own conditions. Her drawings do not shy away from the tasks given to them
by drawing itself, no matter how exacting they might be. Her hand must deposit
the graphite and ink on the paper with steadiness and self-restraint. Her lines
must always be aware of being lines, otherwise they would lose their ability to build
meaning. Yet she does not banish recognisable shapes from her images. Even her
most diagrammatic drawings make some gesture at representation.
This relatively low-key work may serve as an exercise in understanding Mohamedi’s
ambition for drawing. We may be excused for thinking of it as an experimental musical
score or a scientific graph legible only to a very narrow circle of specialists. Yet the
messages this work transmits may in fact be received by any attentive viewer and do not
presuppose any esoteric knowledge. There are horizontal parallel lines, evenly dispersed
over most of the paper. Some air, some openness or emptiness is left at the top. Why?
In a meticulously premeditated counterpoint of straight and curved lines, the parallels
are forced to share the surface with a number of shallow curves and short tentative
diagonals. When these shapes collide they create optical stirs that evoke triangles or
schematic images of cones, but do not conform to the rules of geometry. Somehow their
tops are all cut off or simply left unrepresented. Somehow they are shadows rather
than shapes. Why?
12
E. Dickinson, ‘Poem no.546’ (c.1862), The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, op. cit., p.266.
Nasreen Mohamedi | 41
The notation system chosen for this work, that of the repeated linear mark made
to reverberate through minimal but non-trivial additions and subtractions, prevents
us from registering these triangular presences and voids as bodies of certain dimensions
or as effects of certain causes. We are left with disturbances of horizontal predictability
— rippled surfaces, unstable densities, dissonant silence — and we cannot put our finger
on the exact point where we gave in to the hypnotic power of drawing. Mohamedi’s
graphite and ink traces turn the yellowing paper into a psychic substance that numbs
our attention to everything but her own inner life as she wants us to envisage it. Does
this relatively featureless work not hint at a cunningly masked narcissism? When
confronted with pared-down visual earnestness of this kind, I begin to suspect that
her versatile graphic restraint may also be read as a supremely composed gesture of
withdrawal into unforgiving self-obsession.
Bound — a trouble —
And lives can bear it!
Limit — how deep a bleeding go!
So — many — drops — of vital scarlet —
Deal with the soul
As with Algebra! 13
Nasreen Mohamedi,
Untitled, 1970s,
graphite and ink
on paper, 19 × 19cm
Untitled, 1970s,
graphite and ink
on paper, 47.6 × 47.6cm
Untitled, early 1980s,
pencil on graph paper,
25.4 × 17.3cm, detail
Untitled, early 1980s,
pencil on graph paper,
28 × 21.6cm, detail
Untitled, 1970s,
graphite and ink
on paper, 19 × 19cm
Nasreen Mohamedi would occasionally allow her art to become dramatic, even
theatrical, but she would never betray her ethics of making the maximum of the
minimum, nor compromise her purified vision of drawing. The next image, believed
to date from 1982, prefigures the drawings of the mid-to-late 1980s. She is already
moving away from covering whole surfaces with gridded patterns that I am tempted
to read, from today’s perspective, as Deleuzian ‘images of thought’. 14 Eventually she
will offer singular constellations of rectilinear and curved shapes as melancholy ‘objects’
against an empty background. In some of her later works Mohamedi uses graph paper
as a straightforward reminder of the technical origins of linear drawing. Here, however,
it is an inalienable part of the image. The horizontal printed lines are reinforced in
graphite with decreasing intensity until the eye is left with nothing but units of measurement. Recruiting them to simulate infinity is a calculatedly paradoxical move that
delivers the desired result: an image forever poised between denouncing its all-toovisible constructive principles and celebrating the freedom of mental movement that
only principled construction can bring about.
The eye must actively remind itself that the seven shapes (the ‘islands’ or ‘droplets’
or ‘discs’) that straddle the central vertical of the composition are in fact just drawn
ellipses. They have been arranged and outlined to perform a classical manoeuvre for the
representation of several circular objects, equidistant from each other and receding into
uncomplicated three-dimensional space. Such conventionality is so rare in Mohamedi’s
art that I find it difficult to accept. So I switch to an alternative and less metaphysical
reading, in which the seven shapes remain ellipses of diminishing size, stacked in a
pile like a cartoonist’s unused thought bubbles.
The Soul’s distinct connection
With immortality
Is best disclosed by Danger
Or quick Calamity —
As Lightning on a Landscape
Exhibits sheets of Place —
Not yet suspected — but for Flash —
And Click — and Suddenness. 15
Emily Dickinson often used words that remind today’s readers of technology not yet
invented in the 1860s: ‘car’, ‘film’, ‘pod’, ‘click’. For her, of course, their pre-industrial
meanings were still unsullied. Might she have associated the images and sounds of this
particular poem with photography, as I immediately did? It is possible, but perhaps
only theoretically so. Although the photographer’s craft was thirty years old at the time
of the American Civil War, it was just about beginning to serve art and artists.
13
14
15
E. Dickinson, ‘Poem no.269’ (c.1861), The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, op. cit., p.175.
For an elaboration of the notion of ‘image of thought’, see Gilles Deleuze, Cinéma 2. L’image-temps,
Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1985, especially Chapter 7, ‘La pensée et le cinéma’.
E. Dickinson, ‘Poem no.974’ (c.1864), The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, op. cit., p.455.
42 | Afterall
Untitled, 1970s,
graphite and ink
on paper, 19 × 19cm.
All images courtesy
of Talwar Gallery,
New York and New Delhi
Nasreen Mohamedi | 43
Mohamedi photographed actively from the 1950s until her last years. The resulting
images are extraordinarily articulate and full of pictorial meaning. Now, after her death,
the photographs are widely appreciated, but she herself never exhibited them. To her
they were ‘studies’ in the non-pedagogical sense favoured by art historians. Like some
of the finest self-contained drawings by Jacopo Pontormo, Antoine Watteau or Adolf von
Menzel, her photographs were more than preparatory sketches but less than finished
works. A view, taken in 1971 from the old Mughal capital of Fatehpur Sikri in northern
India, is a fine example of Mohamedi’s use of photography. This horizonless fragment
of 16th-century architecture — the angular furrow through which clear water would have
flown into the now dried-out pool and the ceremonial bridge deprived of its shimmering
reflection — was no doubt cut from a wider shot. That was her practice. The image is an
idiosyncratically geometrical composition, reminiscent of some drawings from the same
period, but its three-dimensional substratum has not been flattened into illegibility. For
Mohamedi the photograph appears to be positioned between what she sees and what she
draws. She treated it as an intermediary, meant to ease her through the movements of
thinking and doing that constitute art-making. In this sense photography was less
fundamental to her than drawing, and her photographs less radical than her drawings.
Another black-and-white photograph, from 1972, offers a spirited diagonal vision
of wool threads in a loom. This, I feel, might be a case of nature imitating art rather than
the inverse. Does the photograph not look very much like a Mohamedi drawing? Does
it not convey the artist’s pleasure in transporting her own two-dimensional achievements
into a new medium? Rather than documenting a fleeting observation that might
crystallise into drawing, it celebrates the memory of victories already won in graphite
on paper.
Presentiment — is that long Shadow — on the Lawn —
Indicative that Suns go down —
The Notice to the startled Grass
That Darkness — is about to pass — 16
Mohamedi’s late drawings move away from the elaborately unstable grid that embodied
visual thinking in her work from the 1970s and early 80s. Their shapes now stand
out from the surface in desolate refinement. For example, the sparse assemblies of
triangular and semi-circular attitudes in a series of three drawings from 1987 are
vaguely reminiscent of the ‘postmodern’ paper architecture so much in vogue at the time.
They are portraits of solitary figures and their attempts at intercourse. Taken separately,
the elements look taut and vigorous enough, but they only connect with each other in
a reticent little dance of sexless attraction and repulsion. Yet they represent Nasreen
Mohamedi’s courage to abstain from moves that brought her success at an earlier stage.
It is as if, to prevent the decline of her art, she discards anything that begins to feel like a
crutch. Although these drawn objects cast no shadows, the poet’s presentiment is visibly
growing in them. Their sprightliness makes nightfall — itself a passing phenomenon
— seem more imminent and real, though perhaps not unambiguously threatening.
Emily Dickinson could rarely deny herself an allusion to that final passage from solitude
of life to solitude of death. What we know of Nasreen Mohamedi tells us that she, too,
would rarely draw a line without thinking of how it must end.
There is a solitude of space
A solitude of sea
A solitude of death, but these
Society shall be
Compared with that profounder site
That polar privacy
A soul admitted to itself —
Finite infinity.17
16
17
E. Dickinson, ‘Poem no.764’ (c.1863), The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, op. cit., p.374.
E. Dickinson, ‘Poem no.1695’ (undated), The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson, op. cit., p.691.
44 | Afterall