Yusuf Arakkal, one of India’s more celebrated artists, passed away on Tuesday morning. As friends and admirers from across the globe took to social media to pay the 71-year-old tribute, we can say this - Arakkal’s work stands alongside the greats, with M.F. Husain and S.H. Raza. Celebrated the world over, he was the ‘Face of Creativity’ - the name of a series of 135 portraits of eminent contemporary artists which was his very last exhibition. DC salutes a man who saw pain and beauty in equal measure. As he said “Art is dialogue...” If anyone knew the language of art, it was Arakkal. His art will speak for him. Always.
"He was one of the strongest people I knew," said artist Milind Nayak, whose association with the legendary Yusuf Arakkal, who died on Tuesday, goes back to 1973. "He never gave in to political demands, he stood up for what he believed in, even if he had to do it alone. This is a big blow."
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His early life was marked by a series of situations that left him standing at odds with the rest of the world, a one-man army who was determined to stand up, at all costs, for what he believed was right. And he believed in art.
Read | ‘Husain? No, I want to be Yusuf Arakkal’
Even as an artist, he shunned labels and affiliations of all kinds, preferring instead to learn from his intuition, to hear the message that came from within. This led to him turning down a scholarship to Santiniketan - he was the first student in Karnataka to receive one - he wanted to find his own identity. As a 23-year-old just beginning to write about art, I asked him once in a sudden moment of daring, if the subject must always remain steeped in terminology.
Yusuf Arakkal with his wife Sarah Arakkal
"How do you know if a painting is good? You look at it and and you know, because it's a feeling," he replied. "I rarely describe my methods or explain my message. Art is what you make of it, really." Arakkal's parents died when he was barely six years old; two tragedies that came snapping at one another's heels.
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"I was alone, after that. Our family was always wealthy, I never wanted in that respect, but in every other sense, I was by myself," he said. "I would sit on the beach in the evenings, watching the sunset, looking at the gold and blue sky turn to copper and red." To him it was nothing short of divine.
Friends who came to offer their condolences at Arakkal’s home on Tuesday
"Prayer is talking to God," he would tell me. "Art is dialogue. Every creative act is godly." Accolades came in tidal waves during the latter half of his life, however.
He won a National Award in 1983 and received the Raja Ravi Varma Puruskaram in 2013, the highest honour bestowed by the Kerala government. He received these with due gratitude, but as he looked back on a long, well-lived life, at the launch of Linear Expressions, a book of his works, he said, "I became an artist because of my passion for it. I had to discard a lot of things, even people I loved dearly, because being an artist was the only thing I have ever wanted. That his passing is a great loss hardly needs to be said. Arakkal, through his life and his work, did what he believed the artist must do: bring light to the darkness.
A Yusuf Arakkal installation ‘Recombinant Revolution’
An artist whose work evolved with time, he has even shared space with works of artists from another era - Van Gogh and Eduard Manet at Museum of Modern Art in New York. His works are in many private and institutional collections all over the world. They were auctioned at Sotheby's, at Christie's, Bonham's, and by South-East Asia's largest auctioneers Larasati in Singapore amongst other places. His art hangs at the British Museum, London and the Museum of Modern Art, New York among other museums worldwide. Auctioned for obscenely high prices in the past, his paintings can now only become even pricier after his unexpected demise.
Yusuf Arakkal was laid to rest on Tuesday. Born in 1945, at Chavakkad near Guruvayur in Kerala, Arakkal’s mother belonged to the royal family of Arakkal- the only Muslim royal family to have ruled Kerala. His father was a Keyees, the well-known business family based in Thalassery. Orphaned at a young age, Yusuf trained in the fine arts from the KCP in Bengaluru, from where he gained a diploma.
Arakkal then later moved on to specialize in the art of graphic print making from the National Academy community studios, Garhi, Delhi. Arakkal received several awards for his work in his lifetime, the most recent one being the Florence Internazionale Biennale- award constituted in the memory of Florentine statesman Lorenzo de Medici- in Florence, Italy, for his work Bacon’s Man with the Child and Priest.
He was also decorated with awards including Karnataka Lalitkala Academy award in 1979 and 1981, a national award in 1983, a special award at the third Asian Art Biennale Dhaka, Bangladesh in 1986 and the Karnataka Lalithkala Academy honor in 1989. Yusuf Arakkal created wide ranging art works in his lifetime, including drawings, paintings, sculptures, murals, paper works, prints, and writing.
