The Gulgee Museum in Karachi is a son’s tribute to a master
Tomorrow, a museum dedicated to the works and artistic legacy of Ismail Gulgee — one of Pakistan’s greatest modernist painters — will officially open to the public and there is one person to thank — his son, Amin.
However, this was one exhibit that Amin Gulgee, the sculptor, performer and curator, did not want to curate. But fate intervened — as it has many times over the years. Amin had asked someone else to curate it but it didn’t work out, and in the end, he had to go through his parents’ photographs, art and life to put together their legacy.
“My father, of course, was a great modernist, very respected, had this incredible trajectory. It was such a challenge. I did not want to curate him,” he shared. “In fact, I’d gotten someone else to do the curatorship and then they backed out. So I thought, OK, I guess this is the way it is and I have to step forth. And I did.”
For those of you who don’t know Gulgee — which, incidentally, is not his real name — was born in Peshawar in 1926 and changed his name from Abdul Muhammad to Gulgee. Gul means child in Pashto. He was an artist best known for his abstract work, which was inspired by Islamic calligraphy, and was also influenced by the “action painting” movement. He was also known for using mixed medium for his paintings.
Gulgee started his career with portraits and adapted the energy and gesture of action painting in a Pakistani context after attending an exhibition of the American abstract painter and muralist Elaine Hamilton in Karachi in 1960.
Gulgee & the museum
When Amin started working on the museum, everything started to fall into place. He ended up dividing his father’s collection into 17 sections. “Of course, I’m a huge fan of my dad’s, right? I grew up watching him paint,” he told Images.
The museum is located on the Gulgee property in Clifton, behind Amin’s studio. The 17 sections cover a room dedicated to Gulgee’s wife Zari called Zaro’s room that features family portraits, photographs and mosaic tabletops. There’s also Gulgee’s room, which mirrors his studio, complete with paint brushes, an easel, his work table with an unfinished mosaic and several photographs with politicians and fellow artists such as Andy Warhol and MF Hussain.
Other sections are divided into Gulgee’s early work, later work, a series on polo and kabbadi, another called “Horse, Camel, Rooster”, portraits that feature American presidents such as George H Bush, Ronald Reagan, Richard Nixon, the Aga Khan IV and his father, his wife Begum Salimah, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, Benazir Bhutto, Ayub Khan, General Ziaul Haq and many, many others.
Gulgee’s work is grand, with bold strokes and colour that take your breath away. Some of the calligraphy takes up a whole wall, but a lot of work on display is simple pencil on paper — yet the detailing shows that Gulgee was a true genius.
“Gulgee’s fascinating because you look at the other abstract expressionists out there and there’s nobody else like him. He stands alone,” said Amin.
“I think part of the reason [for this] was his involvement with Islamic calligraphy, which began in 1974 for the second Islamic conference organised by Zulfikar Ali Bhutto. And then for seven years after that, he immersed himself into the study of calligraphy to write. I mean, again, Gulgee was a self-taught artist,” he explained, adding that Gulgee taught himself how to paint and create portraiture, “and so it’s incredible sort of that strength of his pen on the paper sort of transfers onto the brush and how he uses the brush as a column. It’s incredible.”
According to Amin, his father’s work — as displayed in the museum — has a wonderful mystic, worldly quality. Gulgee, he said, was an unbelievable colourist.
“I mean, the way he could combine these colours that you would not imagine belonging together, making them belong, making them dance in this ethereal tango. Unbelievable,” marvelled the son.
For Amin, this museum is just the tip of the iceberg. “I want a lot more study on Gulgee. What I’ve tried to do is just bring out something. This is the tip of a journey, a process. And I would like other art intellectuals to step in and continue this journey in their own paths,” he said.
“I hope Zaro and Gulgee are happy with me. My sister flew in from the States for the opening. She saw it and was happy. So, for me, that was the acid test,” he shared.
Gulgee & his work
Amin claims that he doesn’t have a favourite work of his father’s and that is why it was so difficult to curate this collection.
“You’re going through Gulgee, and there’s only so much space on the walls, and his paintings are so powerful that they need space. In fact, I wish I had a museum 10 times the size to show this collection,” he said.
“I mean, each work, and at the point it got annoying, I’m just like, Dad, stop it! You know whether it’s a tiny canvas, a foot by a foot, or a mural 20 feet across, I mean, each work holds itself. And I’m not speaking this as a sentimental song,” he explained. “I’ve tried to sort of remove [sentimentality] from the process. He’s no longer father. He’s just an artist and I’m the curator.”
Gulgee & his Zaro
Gulgee met and courted his wife Zaro in London. She was ready to marry him on one condition — that the Aga Khan would marry them. Since Gulgee was working for the Aga Khan at the time, this was easy, and the couple eloped to Paris, France, where they were married by Prince Karim.
Like Gulgee, his wife was a powerhouse. Zaro was one of the first Muslim women of Bombay to get a scholarship to America where she went to do her masters in chemistry.
After they married, the couple moved to Karachi in the early 1960s. Gulgee decided he would give up his career and pursue his passion to paint.
Zaro was an integral part of this change. She told her husband to never compromise on his vision. She helped him as his career took off, running a marble crafts cottage industry that Gulgee had set up where she created table tops and such.
“It was always Zaro and Gulgee. You can’t separate the two. In a strange way, they died together as well,” he said.
In 2007, Gulgee, his wife and a maid were found dead in their Clifton residence. Their bodies were discovered by Amin, who lived next door.
Gulgee & his son
“Luckily, my father did not like cricket. So our way of bonding was he’d paint and I’d paint too. So I grew up painting,” Amin said.
Despite this shared love, father and son never had a chance to create art together. Amin says his father wanted to, but he did not.
“Oh, no, no way. I would never. He wanted that. And I was like, I’m never going to do that, Dad,” he said, adding that his father never wanted him to be an artist.
Amin was studying at Yale when a friend took him to an art history class and that was it. He ended up majoring in art history, won a prize for his thesis and his fate was set in stone. He came back and told his parents he was going to be an artist.
“The only thing they were upset about was me being an artist. My mother was like, listen, I’ve lived with one artist all my life. I don’t need another one.”
Amin says he gave himself three years to make it. If it didn’t happen, he was going to go to law or business school.
According to him, his father allowed him to find his own voice, “to make my mistakes, to see and rectify them. He was my best friend. He was my buddy. Both my parents were. I would tell them everything.”
Amin’s father had always wanted to go to art school but ended up studying engineering. It wasn’t till he eloped with Zaro that he ended up pursing art full time.
Gulgee & how he started
Gulgee, a self-taught artist, always wanted to study art. Unfortunately, he ended up studying engineering.
His father was an engineer during the British Raj. “He used to work up north. He was a very good engineer but he was also an Ismaili preacher. We called them missionaries. He was very popular, and he’d go on horseback and preach all around the mountains. His British boss got upset at him and said, ‘listen, you have to stop preaching’.”
Amin’s grandfather was stubborn. He liked his job and preaching. Soon he was fired and would not get a job for the next 13 years — eventually teaching at Aligarh University.
When his father lost his job, Gulgee’s dream of going to art school came to a screeching halt, as their finances were drained.
“My father, all his life, went through school, high school, everything on scholarship. Went to Goragali, then to Aligarh on scholarship, then to Harvard and Columbia. And at that time, there were no scholarships offered for arts so he became an engineer,” Amin said, adding that Gulgee studied hydraulics and soil mechanics.
While he made his living as an engineer, his love for art always remained. “When he was in New York and Boston, he would go to the museums there. Spend hours copying the old masters. I mean, he’s a consummate technician, my father,” Amin said.
Gulgee’s favourite artists, Amin shared, were Velazquez and Rembrandt.
He remembers the first wife of the late Aga Khan, Prince Karim, once asking his father about her portrait — she said something like, “Gulgee, can I have my portrait, and he said Begum Sahiba it is not finished”.
That portrait is still incomplete and on display on the ground floor of the museum.
Comments