Gulgee Museum:
The Handbook
Curated by Amin Gulgee and Edited by John McCarry
Lightstone Publishers
ISBN: 978-969-716-313-7
311pp.

Every great artist has a story about the moment they chose art over everything else (or perhaps when art chose them). Ismail Gulgee’s story, as I learnt in Gulgee Museum: The Handbook, came with a promise.

By the mid-1950s, the young man from Peshawar had done everything expected of him. He had studied at Lawrence College in Murree before gaining admission to Aligarh Muslim University, followed by stints at Columbia and then Harvard, training not as an artist but as an engineer. Gulgee’s future appeared settled, respectable, even enviable. But if he had followed that course to its end, odds are he may not have found himself being written about in these pages.

Somewhere along the way, engineering had lost its lustre for him. He wanted to paint. But what now may seem like the inevitable path for him to chart — after all, as demonstrated by his corpus, how could this man be anything other than an artist? — was a decision fraught with tangible jeopardy at the time.

Upon hearing this confession about dreams of artistic grandeur, Gulgee’s father, Sher Ali Ismaili, was unconvinced. Before abandoning a profession for which his son had travelled halfway across the world to qualify, Ismaili instructed Gulgee to first seek the advice of Sultan Muhammad Shah, Aga Khan III. An appointment was arranged and a ticket booked for Cannes, where Gulgee explained to the religious leader that he wished to become an artist.

The Aga Khan’s response was measured rather than romantic and entirely befitting of a man who had played no small part in the fight for the creation of Pakistan: “Look, Gulgee, your country needs people like you — qualified, trained people. First, you give a few years — say five — to your country and, when you finish that, you can do what you like.” Gulgee obeyed.

A recently published coffee table book pieces together the remarkable life of the legendary late artist Gulgee through tales recounted by family and friends, critical essays and archival images, revealing a man every bit as fascinating as his art

He returned to Pakistan and worked as a dutiful engineer on the design of the Warsak Dam in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. When the five years were over and his promise fulfilled, Gulgee resigned, declaring, “I will polish shoes, but I won’t do engineering. I will paint.” Hence, before the portraits of kings and presidents, before the explosive abstractions and luminous lapis lazuli mosaics, there was simply a young man at a crossroads trying to negotiate duty, expectation, vocation and ambition.

In many ways, it is precisely this sort of story that makes Gulgee Museum: The Handbook such a richly rewarding publication. Edited by John McCarry and developed alongside the opening of the Gulgee Museum by Gulgee’s son Amin Gulgee, the volume brings together essays by writers, critics, artists and family members alike.

But, having inevitably breathed in Gulgee’s art all throughout my life, in one form or another, I was far more interested in what personal insights this book had to offer into Gulgee the man. And I’m happy to report that it is Gulgee the man — his upbringing, humour, friendships, obsessions, discipline and contradictions — who emerges as the book’s most compelling creation.

As recounted by his brother Noorali in the book, Gulgee’s birth name was Abdul Mohammad Ismaili. “Gulgee” was simply an affectionate name given to boys in Peshawar, meaning flower. In fact, even the surname ‘Ismaili’ carries its own story. Gulgee’s father had abandoned the family surname ‘Rajput’ after Aga Khan III bestowed upon him the surname Ismaili.

In many ways, the book is at its strongest whenever those who knew Gulgee speak with candour about their memories of him. The artist Wahab Jaffer, who passed away just a few weeks ago, recalls first meeting Gulgee in 1972 through artist and gallery-owner Ali Imam, a stalwart of Karachi’s early art scene. Gulgee quickly became mentor, guide and, in Jaffer’s words, a “father figure.” But it is his description of watching Gulgee paint that lingers longest: “He was an action painter. He would run to the canvas and hit it with a broad brush… He would jump around, breathing heavily. It was quite the theatre for me.”

Years later, Amin remembers witnessing the same spectacle, only from the perspective of a son. Growing up, he writes, meant living with “the intense smell of turpentine and oil paints.” His father would indulgently prepare a canvas for him before becoming utterly absorbed in his own work. “I would witness his trance-like state as he danced in front of his surface.”

The book also reminds readers that genius is rarely a solitary enterprise. One of its most affecting essays belongs to the South Asian art historian Savita Apte, who restores Gulgee’s wife Zarine (Zaro) Gulgee to the story. While Gulgee immersed himself in the act of creation, she writes, it was Zaro who promoted his work, cultivated collectors, networked buyers and pursued payments whenever necessary. The artist’s extraordinary career rested upon an equally extraordinary partnership.

Elsewhere, the solemnity surrounding great artists is dismantled. The writer Nazeen Sheikh remembers Gulgee not only as an innovator but as “a madcap brimming with frolic and a great dance partner.” It is a wonderfully human detail.

Artist and art critic Quddus Mirza offers one of the book’s most persuasive reassessments, arguing that Gulgee approached abstraction “not with a Western eye, but through a mind that deciphered its context, impact and multiplicity in the art of Islam.” Mirza also credits Gulgee with freeing modern Pakistani art from the perception that it belonged only to elite audiences. His paintings, he argues, spoke to ordinary Pakistanis as much as to collectors and critics.

Equally illuminating is the writer Bina Shah’s essay on Gulgee’s portraiture. She traces how Ayub Khan understood portraiture as an instrument of cultural diplomacy, commissioning Gulgee to paint monarchs and presidents from across the world. Gulgee insisted on painting or sketching every portrait from life rather than photographs (the only exception being his portraits of Mohammad Ali Jinnah and Allama Iqbal). The studies of figures, including the Shah of Iran, Richard Nixon, Rajiv Gandhi, George H.W. Bush and Ayub Khan, reveal both vulnerability and power, transforming official likenesses into remarkably human studies.

Other contributors illuminate the extraordinary range of his artistic practice. We encounter the figurative paintings and sketches of the 1950s and 1960s, the strking yet unfinished portrait of Begum Salimah Aga Khan, the dazzling pietra dura works fashioned from onyx and lapis lazuli, the monumental calligraphic abstractions, before arriving at the haunting Void paintings and the Nuqta series. Rather than presenting these as disconnected phases, the handbook reveals an artist in perpetual motion, forever searching for another visual language.

Nageen Shaikh’s discussion of Gulgee’s fascination with stone is especially memorable. She recounts how he developed his interest in using this material while travelling across Afghanistan during the late-1950s, after being invited there by King Mohammad Zahir Shah to paint portraits of Shah and his family.

Gulgee himself explained the attraction with characteristic simplicity: “Stone has been lying in the bowels of the earth for millions and millions of years and it will not disintegrate or fade. That is why I use stone. It is almost everlasting.” The remark feels less like a comment on materials than on legacy itself.

The images throughout the volume are as eloquent as the essays. Full-page reproductions capture the physical richness of the paintings, while archival photographs construct another biography. We see Gulgee with heads of state and collectors, but we also encounter more intimate moments that remind us this was a life lived beyond museums and galleries.

By the final page of this publication, Gulgee’s paintings had undeniably acquired a new meaning for me because the man who made them had finally stepped out from behind them. In doing so, the handbook reveals a truth that every great artist’s archive ultimately seeks to uncover: that life can be every bit as fascinating as art.

The reviewer is a member of staff. He can be reached at hasnain.nawab1@gmail.com

Published in Dawn, Books & Authors, July 12th, 2026