November 23, 2002

A retrospective exhibition of Zubeida Agha’s work opens at the Shakir Ali Museum in Lahore

The garden area of the museum is just magical. The benches placed on the lawn by the late professor and the innovations carried out by the PNCA create a small, cloistered haven. The place exudes the presence of Shakir Ali all around: in the red brick walls, arched doorways and the generous skylights.

The museum made an appropriate venue for the important, retrospective exhibition of Zubeida Agha’s work. Together with Zainul Abedin and Shakir Ali, Zubeida Agha is revered as a key figure in establishing modern art in Pakistan. Hers was a great generation of artists and people; role models who, as yet, remain unmatched.

The display of approximately 50 paintings spans a period of six decades, beginning with three paintings from the ‘40s, and ending with the contemplative work of the ‘90s. I took a journey through Agha’s life viewing the work arranged in that time order, and felt again the energy and optimism of the gallant lady in terms of light and colour.

I felt the painter’s excitement fuelled by the myriad of lights lighting the cities at night, and in her company confronted the mysteries of mortality. Until the end the artist’s work emitted echoes of the youthful optimism that transcended pain and physical limitations.

In the early 1940s in Lahore, a posthumous exhibition of Amrita Shergil’s work was held at the Falletti’s Hotel. Sughra Rababi made her studio in that city. Anna Molka Ahmed established the department of fine art at the Punjab University, a 22-year-old girl graduated in philosophy from the Kinnaird College and sought for a reason for her wildly coloured dreams. Zubeida Agha took guidance from Sanyal who initiated her into the basics of art and her dreams quietened down.

Perlingieri inspired Zubeida Agha to paint ideas, to look beyond the visible to an aesthetic ethos that encompassed a language of abstract form. The artist’s exhibition of abstract art held in Karachi in ‘49 set off a controversy that lasted long after she had enrolled as a student at the Ecole des Beaux Arts, Paris. There, Agha told me on our last meeting, she began her serious study of art.

In ‘53 the artist returned to Pakistan with an intense, vigorously imaginative style of painting and in Lahore found several artists exploring a modern idiom. There were Shakir Ali, Shemza, Ahmed Parvez, Ali Imam and Moin Najmi, to name a few. Stimulating the art scene with her own involvement in modernism, Agha was soon acknowledged as a significant influence in modern art circles.

Exhibitions of her work were held in Karachi and she was hailed by the media as a ‘superb colourist.’ In ‘61 she was given the challenging task of setting up an art gallery in Rawalpindi and regarded it as a way to popularize modern art and artists.

Looking back on this era a few weeks before her death, Zubeida Agha spoke of those days as “exciting, with a camaraderie among the artists that is lacking today.”

After sixteen eventful years as the gallery director, in 1977, handing a sizable collection of paintings over to the National Art Gallery — an assemblage that forms the nucleus of the present day collection — Zubeida Agha was finally free to focus on her own work. She travelled, recorded her impressions for posterity and set about mastering the elements of space.

The on-going retrospective is being held under the new lights at the museum, which were installed some time ago and which helped illuminate the work in detail. Visitors were intrigued by the artist’s diverse idiom of symbols. Brush strokes appearing as fragments of calligraphy, organic shapes speaking perhaps of the cycles of life, architectural elements juxtaposing colourful facades with slim black poles interspersed at various angles.

One witnessed the discipline of the muted forms and shapes of the ‘40s assimilated in the joyful, dancing paintings of the ‘50s. The artist loved City Lights and painted these wherever she travelled. From Karachi to New York, she evoked an air of expectation and excitement in her work palpable in the dancing colours and shapes of abstract impressions.

There was a great deal of animation and elation in Zubeida Agha’s paintings, a unique quality that continues to raise the spirits. They are the work of an artist who found joy in life and communicates this aesthetic wonder to successive generations.

The paintings displayed are from the collections of Zubeida Agha’s family members and the PNCA. The exhibition was curated by Dr Mussarat Hassan, who is in the process of completing a monograph on the artist’s life and work. It is a celebration of colour, a joy and a delight.

The director-general of the PNCA, Raja Changez Sultan, has ambitious plans to hold a series of retrospective exhibitions of Pakistan’s masters. The present display is expected to continue until the end of December, giving ample opportunity for art lovers to experience this rare opportunity to visit the indomitable Zubeida Agha.