This article from NYTimes.com
has been sent to you by [log in to unmask]
/-------------------- advertisement -----------------------\
Share the spirit with a gift from Starbucks.
Our coffee brewers & espresso machines at
special holiday prices.
http://www.starbucks.com/shop/subcategory.asp?category_name=Sale/Clearance&ci=274&cookie_test=1
\----------------------------------------------------------/
Afghan Artist Erases Layers of Repression
January 13, 2002
By MARK LANDLER
KABUL, Afghanistan, Jan. 12 - Muhammad Yousef Asefi does
his best work with a palette and a paintbrush. These days,
he has happily put them aside for a sponge soaked in water.
Many mornings, Dr. Asefi can be found at the National
Gallery here, gently scrubbing landscapes and portraits he
painted years ago.
Each brush of the sponge brings a revelation. A swan glides
on a shimmering stream, where there had been only water. A
man stands on a quay in Amsterdam, where there had been a
tall stand of flowers.
It looks like a magic trick. In fact, it is the happy
outcome of an act of cultural subterfuge against a
repressive rule.
When the Taliban seized power in Afghanistan in 1996, they
reimposed an old Islamic ban on depiction of living
creatures in paintings and drawings. For Dr. Asefi, a
physician and a prominent Afghan artist, it was a creative
death sentence.
He was forbidden to paint the horses and other animals that
animate his landscapes, and hundreds of his paintings
hanging in the National Gallery, the Foreign Ministry and
the presidential palace were also in danger of being
destroyed.
So Dr. Asefi devised a risky plan to save them. Over the
five years of Taliban rule, he painstakingly altered 120
oil paintings, blotting out the offending creatures with
watercolor.
Today, he has become a sort of archaeologist, removing the
paint to reveal the life underneath.
"Taking it off is easy," Dr. Asefi said, as he deftly
brought back the crowd in a painting of a quay in the
Amsterdam flower market.
"Putting it on was very difficult."
In a heady aftermath
of the Taliban, stories abound of filmmakers who hid spools
of film or musicians who stashed records and tapes from the
authorities. Culture did not cease in Afghanistan during
the reign of the Taliban; it merely went underground.
Few insurgents were craftier than Dr. Asefi, a 41-year-old
native of Kabul. The son of a government worker, he is an
unlikely rebel. Although Dr. Asefi loved art from
childhood, he earned a medical degree as a hedge against
the vagaries of painting.
With his mild manner and neatly trimmed beard, Dr. Asefi
looks more like an office worker than an artist. When he
talks about the Taliban, though, his usually twinkling eyes
harden.
"They were determined to destroy the culture of
Afghanistan," Dr. Asefi said. "Gradually, step by step,
they would have come around to destroying my paintings."
Dr. Asefi said he would have been beaten and jailed if the
Taliban had caught him and realized that he was
undercutting their ban. His medical career would also have
been over. Yet none of this deterred him.
He was helped immeasurably in his campaign by Muhammad
Saber Latifi, a prosperous businessman who is his patron.
In addition to giving him money and arranging to exhibit
his paintings outside Afghanistan, Mr. Latifi encouraged
Dr. Asefi in his deception.
Mr. Latifi turned over a room in his office for Dr. Asefi
to hide portraits that could not be altered. And he gave
Dr. Asefi a studio, where he could paint without fear of
being caught.
Mr. Latifi's crusade went beyond Dr. Asefi. Shortly after
the Taliban came to power, he paid off a guard at the
National Gallery to sell him 50 paintings that were likely
to run afoul of the government. The paintings, most by
20th-century European artists, included several nudes.
For the last five years, they have been rolled up in an
underground bunker at Mr. Latifi's office, next to a
collection of copper jugs. A heavy flower pot once blocked
the door.
"I could have lost my life and the lives of my family for
keeping nudes," Mr. Latifi said. "But we had to resist the
rule of the Taliban because it was evil. We could not
succumb to it."
Dr. Asefi's resistance began on Sept. 26, 1996, when the
Taliban swept into Kabul, seized the presidential palace
and executed the former president, Najibullah. Soon after
they entered the palace, the Taliban tore up eight of Dr.
Asefi's paintings, which hung there.
Hearing about this, Dr. Asefi worried about 42 other
paintings of his in the Foreign Ministry.
After experimenting at home with watercolor over oil paint,
Dr. Asefi visited the ministry and proposed to the new
Taliban officials that he repair the paintings. He
collected the works and over 2 1/2 months, methodically
covered the depictions of living creatures.
Dr. Asefi then rotated the paintings so that none hung in
its original place. He wanted to avoid the danger that a
sharp-eyed official might notice a missing person or horse.
When one Taliban official quizzed him, Dr. Asefi told him
he was "redecorating."
As it happens, nobody seemed to notice the changes. Dr.
Asefi believes that is mostly because the religious
extremism of the Taliban allowed for little appreciation of
art.
"The Taliban were not interested in art," he said. "They
just looked at the pictures and if they saw a living
creature, they put it on a list to be destroyed."
Once he completed his work at the ministry, Dr. Asefi moved
on to the National Gallery, where he altered 80 paintings
over three months. Despite its edict, the Taliban had not
yet turned its attention there. He removed some portraits,
which no amount of watercolor could fix, and replaced them
with landscapes of similar size.
Dr. Asefi's alterations were not always subtle. In the
painting of Amsterdam, his use of large bunches of flowers
to obscure people is almost comically obvious.
Nor is the cleansing process foolproof. In scrubbing the
watercolor off a painting of an Afghan landscape, Dr. Asefi
uncovered the image of a man on horseback. But the oil
paint under the watercolor also faded, marring the look of
the painting.
The point of Dr. Asefi's campaign, however, was not to
create new art, but to save his existing art from the
Taliban's knives and torches. In this, he succeeded
brilliantly.
As a result, Dr. Asefi has become something of a cultural
hero in Afghanistan. His days are filled with meetings with
cultural officials, visiting dignitaries, and foreign
journalists. Next month, his paintings will be exhibited in
London.
"He is a symbol of cultural resistance," said the culture
minister of Afghanistan's interim government, Sayeed
Makhdoom Rahin, after welcoming Dr. Asefi. "We are proud of
him."
As the doctor rushes to his next appointment - hurtling
through Kabul in a battered Volkswagen beetle, one wonders
how his new-found celebrity will affect his art.
The early years of the Taliban rule were tough on Dr.
Asefi.
Aside from altering paintings, he produced little new work.
Unable to show or sell his paintings, he considered
abandoning art altogether and concentrating on his career
as an internist.
"He seemed a broken man," Mr. Latifi said. "At one time, he
had been respected and praised as one of our finest
artists. But under the Taliban, being a painter was
rubbish."
Yet adversity forced Dr. Asefi into new directions. He
began to experiment with a more abstract style, partly to
stretch himself and partly to evade the strictures of the
Taliban.
The other day, Dr. Asefi proudly showed off an abstract
painting, which he said depicted a spider in its web.
Chuckling, he noted that observers of art far more astute
than the Taliban would have trouble picking out the
creature in this indeterminate canvas.
"I wanted to develop a new style," he said. "But I wanted a
style that the Taliban would not recognize."
Dr. Asefi said the fall of the Taliban had recharged him.
Still, it is tough finding time to turn out new paintings
when people are clamoring to hear about how he rescued his
old ones.
For all the acclaim, he also recognizes that he saved only
a fraction of his country's treasures.
"If I had the ability to cover the Buddhas of Bamian, I
would have done it," said Dr. Asefi, referring to the giant
statues that were blown up last year by the Taliban.
"Unfortunately, they were 50 meters tall."
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/01/13/international/asia/13ARTI.html?ex=1011902585&ei=1&en=628b222f7d3695bd
HOW TO ADVERTISE
---------------------------------
For information on advertising in e-mail newsletters
or other creative advertising opportunities with The
New York Times on the Web, please contact Alyson
Racer at [log in to unmask] or visit our online media
kit at http://www.nytimes.com/adinfo
For general information about NYTimes.com, write to
[log in to unmask]
Copyright 2001 The New York Times Company
=========================================================
Important Subscriber Information:
The Museum-L FAQ file is located at http://www.finalchapter.com/museum-l-faq/ . You may obtain detailed information about the listserv commands by sending a one line e-mail message to [log in to unmask] . The body of the message should read "help" (without the quotes).
If you decide to leave Museum-L, please send a one line e-mail message to [log in to unmask] . The body of the message should read "Signoff Museum-L" (without the quotes).
|
