J. Iqbal Geoffrey

(1939-2021)
Pakistan & United States

Pakistani & U.S. lawyer, poet, and painter

Joel Rudikoff Art Books, White Plains, New York, in their abebook.com listing of Geoffrey's, Iqbal Geoffrey's Paintings Drawings Water Colors 1949-1963 (New York: Grand Moderns) provides the following biographical sketch of Iqbal Geoffrey:

The artist was born in Chinot, India (after the partition, West Pakistan) in 1939. A polymath at an early age, by the mid-1950s he had achieved recognition as a painter, writer and poet; in 1955 he founded and to 1959 edited Pakistan's only international journal, "Pen Post." Presumably to ensure himself a day job, he graduated with distinction from the Law College of Lahore and won a Bachelor of Laws degree from the University of the Punjab. After having had five studio shows in Pakistan, in early 1960 he arrived in London to be a professional painter. Almost immediately he was noticed by Herbert Read, H.W. Janson and Norbert Lynton and was represented in group and one-person shows in the British Isles, Paris, India. By 1962 he was in the United States (first at the Huntington Foundation and then at the MacDowell Colony) and had exhibitions in Boston and at Grand Central Moderns in New York. His work were soon acquired by, among others, Nelson Rockefeller, Joseph Hirshhorn, Vera and Albert List and the Tate Gallery. Over the years Geoffrey did in fact keep his day job; after a few years as a student at Harvard (law, art history) and having gained American citizenship, he was assistant attorney general for the state of Illinois and was also a human rights officer for the United Nations. He still devotes a portion of his time to his legal career in Pakistan. In 2002 he represented Mir Aimal Kasi, a Pakistani national, in an appeal of a U.S. death sentence stemming from Kasi's conviction of killing two CIA employees outside the agency's Virginia headquarters in 1993. The appeal was unsuccessful.

Pakistani artist files £65 million lawsuit against UK gallery

Iqbal Geoffrey lawsuit

A Response From Geoffrey

Art

Iqbal Geoffrey's Golden Jubilee Show

Iqbal Geoffrey