PROFILE Godfrey Barker profiles Shaikh Rashid bin Khalifa Al Khalifa, whose daughters told him: “Daddy, you are astonishing, yet nobody knows you”
I meet the Arab world’s most remarkable new painter – he’s “new”, though he has painted for 40 years in a secluded studio in the Bahraini desert. Palms droop in the heat, sand dotted by camels spreads in every direction, the causeway to the deserts of Saudi Arabia runs nearby; this is a hiding place. Shaikh Rashid bin Khalifa Al Khalifa is a new artist because though Bahrain is aware of him, the world is not. British-educated, highly gifted, he has never had a one-man show outside Bahrain. His flame burns in the dark of Aladdin’s Cave.
Suddenly, last spring, all changed. He decided to show to the world his unseen work of the last eleven years at Bahrain’s National Museum. It took his teenage daughters to make this happen. They told their father, or this is the gist of it, “Daddy, you are astonishing to us yet nobody knows you.”
These girls are to be credited not just with loyalty but with judgement. On blackened walls in the museum the Shaikh showed 50 abstract paintings mounted, uniquely, on convex stretchers. Surprise at their very existence was widespread. The editor of Canvas Magazine pronounced the unknown Rashid Al Khalifa to be “close to the top of contemporary Arab achievement”.
The artist unveiled himself and his art at a reception at which he was visibly highly popular, not least with humble people.“Call me Rashid,” he urged 40-odd writers at a press conference, showing a democracy at odds with the high-handedness ascribed to the Al Khalifas in the February troubles.
His courtesy proved not to be acting. In his studio, I found him gentle, self-deprecating, smiling but openly nervous of my reaction to his art.
Here was a lifetime’s work, 280-odd pictures, all present bar a few given away. The finest turned out to be the most recent; unusual, for few artists reach a peak in later life. Abstraction is the most difficult of painterly arts; if you doubt it, try it. It demands sureness in placing of masses inside the frame, subtlety in balance and opposition of colours.
I was startled by the compositional strength of these pictures, by the delicacy of brushwork, by the inventive manipulation of the paint and by the confrontation built into three-dimensional convex surfaces. Above all the richness of colour burns with desert heat not easily conveyed on British newsprint. Could abstract painting of such quality be so long in hiding? It could.
Christie’s and Sotheby’s have, one gathered, not come across Al Khalifa. The British Museum’s curator, in conversation, nodded in knowledge but Tate Modern, on my inquiry, is unaware.
His profile is low by his own wish and his own creation. Rashid Al Khalifa may be unique in the Middle East (on my best understanding) for never selling a picture. One wonders why; high prices, in the 21st century, make reputations.
But his is not the exotic fate of Vincent van Gogh in Arles, who tried to sell his work and failed. Rashid Al Khalifa is in a happy position undreamed by most artists. He does not want to sell and he does not need the money. Nor does he lust for fame, with whose sudden arrival he is not obviously comfortable. His luxury has been and is to keep his art close by him.
His life in hiding may be summed up as follows. In the 1960s and 70s, starting as a schoolboy in West Riffa aged ten, he painted pure landscapes of the Bahraini desert. His landscapes turned more abstract in the 1980s. His main interest in the late-80s and for most of the 90s became figuration. Since 1999 he has created his Convex Series of abstract art.
He builds these abstracts by layering fields of colour whose final surface he then attacks with combs, knives, sandpaper and sponges and partially scrapes away. Something mysterious and luminous comes to light. “My aim,” Al Khalifa says, “is to open up hidden depths and movements in the paint. If the effect demands it, I may then add extra layers in small or large areas and build up the surface.”
The result is sometimes like a mountain range of abstract colour with peaks and valleys, though these are in no way literal mountains. Marine No 4 in tumultuous greens and browns is rent by a ridge of paint, like a line of rocks seen from on high. Cobalt No 3, though wholly abstract, seems to gaze from the sky upon the earth through restless sweeps of cloud and holes in the cumulus.
Are nature and landscape breaking through these abstracts? Rashid ponders. “I hint at it,” he answers. He uses convex stretchers, he says, because they have volume. They advance a painting towards the viewer and pull him or her into it.
“A flat canvas distances the viewer. A convex surface makes a picture three-dimensional and, when it is stood on the floor or suspended from the ceiling, it is more sculptural,” he declares. “But I like it most for diminishing the separation of the viewer from what he sees on the wall. It closes the gap.”
Does he sketch before he paints? No; when he starts, he does not know how a picture will end. He does not calculate. You’re planning the right mistakes? I ask. He nods.
“I start with a white canvas. Normally I begin by putting down dots, then I put colours and I do this until I reach a shape that satisfies me. Or maybe I paint figures, figures that dance. I then remove their shape and outline and meaning and leave just the colour behind. Sometimes I start by throwing paint.” This technique is accident and design at the same time.
Rashid arrived at abstraction after painting portraits and figures in the 1990s with similar risk and accident. “My art changed under my brush. It happened without any clear intention.”
The abstracts, the 2000-2011 Convex Series, “grew” out of his landscapes and portraits. He is not the first artist, of course, to whom accidents deliberately happen. Both Kandinsky and Willem de Kooning allowed landscape to dissolve on the canvas into abstract forms. For any artist, the road of accidents is a fertile path to creation.
Rashid al Khalifa drew at age ten. He painted from age 14, the start of a remarkable life. His murals lined the corridors of West Riffa School.
Art is what matters, but it is only part of him. His main job in 2011 is in the Government. He serves as Minister for Immigration and Nationalities on Bahrain. He also works in close co-operation with Shaikha Mai Al Khalifa, the Culture Minister. In a life of duty, art is possible only at nights and weekends. Even at home the telephone interrupts him routinely.
This is no typical artist life. Government and Royal Family duty did not interfere with Caravaggio, Picasso or Francis Bacon. But they have not been uniformly negative to creation.In strange ways, Al Khalifa’s life has looked after his art. He had, at first, no choice in his future. A solo exhibition at age 18 in the late-1960s caught the eye of the Emir; but the Emir, now King, had other plans for him.
He was dispatched to Hendon Police College in London to gain skills needed to serve as a future Interior Secretary in Bahrain. “In fact,” confesses Rashid, “I never went near the place. I learnt English at Bournemouth” (many Bahrainis speak English better than we do) “while, by night, I was taking classes in painting.”
Almost inevitably, a letter from London soon arrived in Bahrain. Hendon is not for me, Rashid courageously addressed the Emir, my career and happiness lie in art. The Emir did more than assent. He created a scholarship on which Rashid spent three years in the early-1970s in Brighton and Hastings Art College, studying art and design, picking up architecture and photography.
Rashid returned from England, now a full-time painter, to found the Bahrain Art Society and to encourage others.
Politics entered his life, he explains, only after he married the daughter of the Prime Minister, Shaikh Khalifa bin Salman Al Khalifa. “I wanted to do something for the country,” he says. The police were forgotten. Understandably, he voted for the Ministry of Culture.
His oeuvre, 280 pictures, is not large over 40 years. Is he busy or is he lazy? “Both,” he assents. So why so few? He has one advantage, Rashid says, to explain it. Unlike the mass of artists, he is free from the need to create thousands of works to survive. He is free to give months, even a full year to a single picture.
He also sees advantage in his public life and obligation to travel. He meets the world and is exposed to many cultures.European influence on his work is obvious. In London he was often at the Tate, the V&A, the Wallace and the National Gallery, studying art unseen on Bahrain. I ask him which tradition he sits in. Is he more Middle Eastern or European?
“Every artist has his own background,” he replies.“Some build exclusively on their own culture. Others build on their heritage but are influenced beyond it by the art of the whole world.This is how I like it.”
Rashid Al Khalifa’s interests go beyond painting and drawing. He has been involved in numerous architectural and interior designs in Bahrain, notably the Sail Tower building not far from the Pearl Roundabout. He also designs Swiss watch faces and postage stamps. He is, says Culture Secretary Shaikha Mai bint Mohammed Al Khalifa, “a national treasure”.
Nothing is unusual, Shaikh Rashid insists, about being both Royal and artistic on Bahrain.“My elder brother drew. A number of the Al Khalifa family could have been artists. If they had trained properly, they could have done well. Four or five in my father’s generation were good artists – all now passed away – and here are four or five working now, mostly female, mostly young. All have potential. Some exhibit.
“Maybe it’s a coincidence. Perhaps there is a little refinement to a dynasty now 250-years-old.”
Four of his pictures are on show in London this year at the reopened Four Seasons Hotel in Park Lane. 