The recently opened Gulgee Museum is not only a homage of a son, Amin Gulgee, to his father, Ismail Gulgee; but a gift to Karachi, and to the pub
The recently opened Gulgee Museum is not only a homage of a son, Amin Gulgee, to his father, Ismail Gulgee; but a gift to Karachi, and to the public beyond the city, even to the country, and more importantly to those who live outside of the art world.
Ismail Gulgee, one of the most recognized and renowned artists of Pakistan, was enrolled in engineering at the Aligarh University in 1943, followed by his studies at Columbia (M.S., Hydraulics, 1947) and Harvard (M. S. Soil Mechanics, 1948). His earlier job was of an engineer, but later he completely devoted himself to art; and held exhibitions in different cities of the world including some highly prestigious venues (such as Hirshhorn Museum, Fukuoka Art Museum, Royal Academy of Arts Jordan and many more).
In a country with not many public museums, state art galleries, and particularly those around a single artist, it is the family, foundation, or follower who assumes the role to preserve the artist’s legacy for the next generations. Some also include personal artifacts, journals, studio objects, letters, collections of books along with the artist’s creations to portray a complete and contextual picture of the maker. Because in a regular art gallery, spectators normally see a select number of the latest pieces; but the function of a museum, instead of a commercial establishment, is educational. A museum is not solely for the lovers of art, collectors and auctioneers, but caters to art students, researchers, critics, curators also.
Gulgee Museum is one of this kind, since it suffices the artist’s aesthetics in a chronological order, which logically, and eventually, becomes a cartography of his style. The artist, from his early abstraction heavy surfaces (Flight 1965, Cosmos,1970, and Unity 1974), began to incorporate elements of Arabic calligraphy; eventually absorbing the flowy paint laden brush’s tracks on the canvas (Untitled, 1998). The museum also helps in broadening the limitation of West and East, of realistic and abstract, of high art and craft. For Ismail Gulgee, a person of world exposure and wide vision there hardly exist confinements, on the other hand, he located – and constructed bridges between varying practices. To him, making the portrait of an individual was equal to producing an abstract canvas; since both were occasions to explore the possibilities of self, through quick, hurried, hence honest gestures. The delight an artist gleans from the act of making art was once explained, when in the beginning of my postgraduate studies a second year student from Japan asked me ‘what do you think of the work produced in the painting school?’ My instant answer was, ‘it seems everyone is in love of paint’; to which he replied; ‘are you not?’.
Visiting Gulgee Museum in Karachi, one receives the same reply, through the practice which expanded not merely to oil on canvas, but in pencil, chalk and ink on paper, lapis lazuli mosaic, sculptures, and mixed media paintings. Usually artists and art critics consider drawing somewhat lower in comparison to painting and sculpture. A similar parallel is discussed in Susan Sontag’s essay ‘A Poet’s Prose’. Quoting different writers, Sontag adds that in Joseph Brodsky’s opinion “it is inevitable that the poet be regarded as the aristocrat of letters, the prose writer the bourgeois or plebeian; that – another of Brodsky’s images – poetry be aviation, prose the infantry.”
Ismail Gulgee in his constant search for ideal form proves that the change of routes is merely a means in finding the absolute truth. A creative individual’s consistent quest –illustrated in room after room of Gulgee Museum, intelligently organized and amazingly curated by Amin Gulgee. Everything here seems different in scale, imagery, content, technique, material, but all feel to be tied together in an unseen entity. Probably the truth, which – like God, is present everywhere, but not graspable anywhere. Surveying the entire oeuvre of Ismail Gulgee, reminds of Jorge Luis Borges’ short story, The Library of Babel, of, “The universe (which others call the library) is composed of an indefinite and perhaps infinite numbers of hexagonal galleries”, and of shelves comprising books. The narrator of the tale
has spent his life searching a single volume that contains the word (of God, or truth), on a single page of one of those books.
Likewise, a viewer can keep on visiting to search for the truth in works of Gulgee, arranged in different rooms of his museum; as Gulgee continued till his last day on this earth.
