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hether Esther Rahim, Esmet Rahim, or simply E Rahim, the multiple personae of this painter, long lost in the labyrinthine narratives of Pakistani art, rekindle memories of a time when this country was a cosmopolitan place. Its backward drift began in the mid-1970s.
Born in 1904 as Esther, the eldest child of a Munich family, “she studied art in Düsseldorf and took courses in sculpture.” Later, “she enrolled in the Psychology Department at Munich University and obtained a PhD.” As her son, Sikandar Rahim, notes, “it was around then that she met Rahim, who was continuing his chemistry studies after obtaining a degree at Cambridge University. They married in 1929.”
JA Rahim belonged to an illustrious Bengali family. He joined the Indian Civil Service in 1931. After the Partition in 1947, he moved to Pakistan to serve in the Foreign Ministry and was appointed ambassador to various capitals, accompanied by Esmet Rahim.
The recently opened retrospective Esmet Rahim: Journeys from Real to Surreal at COMO Museum (September 28, 2025 - January 4, 2026) encompasses all phases of her life, her formative years in Europe, her subsequent life as a diplomat’s wife, her artistic practice, and, most importantly, her role as a chronicler of the subcontinent. The only difference is that her archive is not made of words, but of images.
Elegantly and intelligently curated by Samina Iqbal, the exhibition reveals how an artist shifts from one style to another, explores different subjects and evolves ideas, often in seemingly contradictory directions. It portrays Rahim both as a surrealist painter and a realist, with a remarkable command of likeness in portraits of figures such as Sarojini Naidu, her father-in-law, her husband, her daughter and the male and female models who posed for her.
An interesting and unexpected aspect of the show is the inclusion of Esmet Rahim’s sketches, illustrations, dress designs and collected newspaper clippings, alongside write-ups on her exhibitions and photographs of her solo shows, official receptions and meetings with dignitaries. This material, carefully preserved by her son Sikandar Rahim, was selected by Samina Iqbal during her stay at the Rahim residence in Munich.
Esther, or Esmet Rahim, was a fairly well-known artist during her lifetime. Yet, despite Giorgio de Chirico’s remarks and excerpts of glowing critical praise displayed on the walls of the COMO Museum, she remained largely unheard of for years in the Islamic Republic. One obvious reason could be that, much like the country’s history itself, the story of Pakistani art has seldom been treated with honesty and consistency. Another explanation may lie in her husband’s diplomatic career; frequent postings abroad could have kept her away from the local art scene.
Although Esmet Rahim was among the founding members of the Karachi Arts Council alongside Zubeida Agha, she is almost absent from the concise histories of Pakistani art, a painful omission noted during the panel discussion at the opening of her Lahore retrospective.
Perhaps her disappearance is rooted in other factors too: her foreign origins, and her position as a woman overshadowed by a prominent spouse, a senior government official and founding member of a political party. Many female migrants in Pakistan have suffered similar eclipsing, their creative legacies dimmed by association with better-known husbands. Anna Molka Ahmed, however, managed to escape this fate, thanks to her assertive temperament, her pioneering role in Pakistan’s art education and her early divorce from Sheikh Ahmed, a painter of lesser talent.
It was not the country that lost Esther Rahim; instead, Esmet Rahim left behind a country that was once cosmopolitan, inclusive and diverse.
According to curator Samina Iqbal, “this first comprehensive exhibition of Esmet Rahim’s work brings together the breadth of her artistic and intellectual journeys, her struggles as well as her accomplishments, through her paintings, drawings and archival material spanning 1931 to 1963.” The retrospective convincingly resurrects the many lives of this once-forgotten painter, first, as a surrealist, which in itself was a rare choice.
If her inclination towards urrealism drew inspiration from the artists active during her years of training, her studies in psychology may also hold a clue to her fascination with what lies beneath the visible world. The exhibition’s central body of work comprises landscapes of the mind, cartographies of dreams and residues of shared fears. Painted, layered, rubbed and blended, these images chart the wanderings of imagination unconstrained by convention, as seen in The Death of Don Juan (1962), The Last Day (1961-62) and Wraith (1961-62).
This, in truth, is the ideal trajectory of a creative individual, yet one rarely evident among artists bound by the security of style and the standardisation of production. In Rahim’s case, surrealism itself is reshaped, manipulated and managed to the extent that it begins to appear as a canny form of reality.
More surprises await visitors to Esmet Rahim’s retrospective. Her early pieces, drawings, watercolours and paintings of human figures, are displayed alongside work that is not usually classified as fine art: posters, prints and illustrations. A similar rediscovery once occurred with Lala Rukh, the reclusive artist and art educator who, alongside her posters for the Women’s Action Forum, quietly produced a remarkable body of work without any desire to turn it into gallery commodities. Only after her death did her invisibility fade; today, her presence in major international exhibitions is almost expected, most recently in a survey of Pakistani art at the National Museum of Qatar in Doha.
Viewing Esmet Rahim’s paintings of Bavarian landscapes, the Simla hills, her self-portraits and surrealist canvases, one might initially take her for a conventional painter. Yet the exhibition offers something far richer. Her photographs, magazine illustrations, and, most notably, her paintings reveal a dialogue between tradition and modernity. Like her contemporary and friend Amrita Sher-Gil from Simla, Rahim merges traditional Indian imagery with the aesthetic vocabulary of modern European art, creating a bridge between two worlds of a postcolonial society.
Rahim’s early paintings, reminiscent of Sher-Gil’s in their tone and treatment, reveal the shared realities of the two artists. The first, a European woman married to an Indian, later Pakistani, man; the second, the daughter of a Hungarian mother and a Sikh father. Both observed the South Asian world through lenses distinct from those of its inhabitants. Hence, the recurring images of women in indigenous attire, maidens sitting together, an Indian woman bent over her spinning wheel, a mother cradling her child, evoking the motif of the Madonna and Child. Her fashion drawings, too, record trends once popular among Pakistani women; in several gouache works, sari-clad figures with bindi on their foreheads appear as timeless emblems of an evolving culture.
Arguably one of the most compelling sections of the exhibition, an addition by curator Samina Iqbal, in collaboration with Sikandar Rahim, is the display of black-and-white photographs showing the artist engaged in her diplomatic and domestic roles. In these images, she is seen mingling and conversing with men of power from around the world, moving with ease and a quiet sense of authority.
This segment of the show, shaped by Iqbal’s meticulous research, serves as a poignant reminder that it was not the country that lost Esther Rahim; instead, Esmet Rahim left behind a country that was once cosmopolitan, inclusive and diverse; a place where it hardly mattered whether a woman signed her canvases as Esther Rahim, Esmet Rahim or simply E Rahim.
The writer is a visual artist, an art critic, a curator and a professor at the School of Visual Arts and Design, Beaconhouse National University, Lahore. He can be contacted at quddusmirzagmail.com.