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Zubeida Agha was born in 1922 in Lyallpur (now called Faisalabad) in the Punjab province of British India.  She did her university studies in Lahore, about 100km east of Faisalabad, at the all-women’s Kinnaird College, studying philosophy and political science (Naseer).  After her graduation in 1944, inspired to paint by a recurring dream (“about colours, in which day after day she saw herself painting” [Ali]), Agha began art studies in the basement teaching studio of B. C. (Bhabesh Chandra) Sanyal known as the Lahore School of Fine Arts (Gupta).

In 1946, Agha’s brother Hamid, an art critic and government bureaucrat, introduced her to Italian artist Mario Perlingieri, who was interned in Walton Camp, Lahore as a prisoner of war (Imam et al.).  Perlingieri, who had studied with Picasso and was well versed in Italian Futurism, introduced Agha to contemporary European ideas of abstraction (“Zubeida Agha,” Khaas Gallery).  That same year, Agha exhibited her work at the All-India Exhibition, hosted by the Lahore Museum, where she received a discount on the entry fee because she was not a formally-educated professional artist.  Her work was praised by the museum’s curator, Dr. Charles Fabri (“Zubeida Agha,” Khaas Gallery).

Agha’s first solo art exhibition took place in Karachi in 1949 (Ali), where it was held at the YMCA because at that time there was no dedicated space for public art exhibition in Karachi (Husain).  Pakistan was now an independent country following the 1947 Partition from India.  At this point Agha was painting in a strictly modernist, though not entirely abstract, style.  As such, her 1949 exhibition may be considered to be the first modernist art exhibition in Pakistan.  Reactions at the time were decidedly mixed, with particularly vocal criticism coming from the writer Atiya Fyzee, who reportedly described Agha’s work as an “addled type of art” that might be “seen in asylums” (Rizvi).  Agha later noted, “People said I was crazy to want to paint ideas, which is much more difficult than painting something from life. It is very difficult to create something from your mind” (“Zubeida Agha,” Khaas Gallery).

Undaunted, Agha traveled in 1950 to London and then to Paris to continue her studies in a more formal educational setting.  (Later in life, she advised an aspiring artist, "If you want to be an artist, then become a professional artist and not a Sunday artist." Imam et al.)  She spent six months studying at St. Martin’s in London and then two years in Paris at the Ecole des Beaux Arts (Ali).  While abroad, Agha’s work was exhibited in solo exibitions, first at the Trafford Gallery, London in 1951, and then at the Galerie Henri Tronche, Paris in 1952 (“Zubeida Agha,” Khaas Gallery).

Agha returned to Pakistan in 1953, where she worked and lived first in Karachi (“Zubeida Agha,” Khaas Gallery), which at that time was the capital of Pakistan.  In 1961 she moved to Rawalpindi, two years after the Pakistani capital moved to Rawalpindi’s twin city, Islamabad.  That year Agha became executive director of The Art Galleries in Rawalpindi, which was created under the auspices of the Society for Contemporary Art and is considered Pakistan’s first art gallery.  She later wrote about this period:

“I was offered to start an Art Gallery in Rawalpindi and I arrived here in May 1961 when I reached Rawalpindi I discovered that there was no place available to start the gallery, no staff had been engaged and there were no funds available either for engaging the staff or renting the building or my salary.  The only facility I had was that a bed sitting room had been booked for me for 10 days in one of the Government Hostels…  This gallery eventually became the show window of Pakistan for paintings.  The sales in this gallery were the highest in the country and it became a matter of pride for an artist to exhibit here.”  (Agha, UNESCO Fellowship Report)

Agha led The Art Galleries for 16 years, regularly exhibiting work by established and emerging Pakistani artists despite the gallery’s chronic shortage of funds and staff.  By the 12th anniversary of The Art Galleries in 1974, more than 140 exhibitions had been held there, resulting in the sale of more than 700 paintings by Pakistani artists (Art Galleries).

Agha’s operation of The Art Galleries, along with her founding memberships in a number of art societies such as the Society for Contemporary Art, gave impetus to the eventual creation of the Pakistani National Art Gallery and the Arts Council of Islamabad.  In fact, through a UNESCO fellowship, Agha traveled and wrote a report on “best practices” for running a museum on a trip that took her to Tokyo, San Francisco, Oakland, Los Angeles, Dallas, St. Louis, Chicago, Cleveland, Buffalo, Washington, Boston, Philadelphia, and New York (Agha, UNESCO Fellowship Report).  Agha retired from director duties in 1977, at which time The Art Galleries closed.  Upon her retirement, she turned over the considerable collection of paintings she had assembled as director to the future National Art Gallery in Islamabad (Nelson-Sirhandi).

Upon her retirement from The Art Galleries, Agha returned to working full time on her own art.  She worked in relative seclusion over the next twenty years until her death, in Islamabad, in 1997.  A number of paintings by Agha can still be found at her home in Islamabad, where her youngest brother now lives and maintains her work (Yusaf).

Agha received the Pakistani President’s Award for the Pride of Performance in 1965.  Other awards she received included Quaid-e-Azam Award (1982), Shakir Ali Award (1983) and National Award for Lifetime Achievement in Art (1996) (Ali).  A postage stamp honoring Agha was released by the Pakistan Post in 2006 as part of the Painters of Pakistan series (“Painters of Pakistan: Latest stamp series”).  One of the Guerrilla Girls, whose members adopt pseudonyms in tribute to groundbreaking female artists, works under the name Zubeida Agha (Ryzik).

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Agha was primarily a painter, but she also (mainly earlier in her career) made sculptures.  Her preferred medium was oil paint on canvas.  In some of her writings, Agha referred to her paintings as abstract, intended to capture the “essence of ideas” (Agha, Notes on Pakistani Art and Artists).  Certainly she adopted a modernist style quite early in her career, presumably at first as a consequence of her informal training with Perlingieri.  In particular, probably as a result of her association with the Italian, some writers linked Agha’s work with Futurism (Press Information Department, Foreign Publicity Branch).  Her style is clearly not cubist, which set her apart from many of her contemporaries in India and Pakistan.  In any case, the principle that seemed to guide Agha’s work almost from the beginning was her commitment to “painting ideas” rather than objects.  While her work is abstract in the sense of being concerned with intangible ideas rather than concrete objects, some writers have noted that Agha’s works generally contain figurative elements and as such are usually not entirely abstract in the sense of being non-representational (Imam et al.).

Agha’s work has been characterized as being extremely personal.  She was said to be an introspective person who preferred solitude when possible and – outside her work at the gallery and art society – was not known for fraternizing with fellow artists or engaging in heated debates about art (Ali).  The “ideas” her work engaged with, and the imagery she chose to illustrate them, were likely drawn from her own idiosyncratic memories and mental associations.  That said, her work certainly reflected the community and culture that surrounded her.  Many of the figurative elements that recur in her work (flowers, trees, horses, buildings) carry cultural significance.  But there is no apparent message, such as a political perspective or statement of identity, in her work, which is in keeping with the modernist view of art as autonomous.

It is difficult to characterize the “typical” Agha painting because there is quite a bit of diversity in her work with respect to form, color, and degree to which it contains recognizable figurative elements.  Generally her paintings juxtapose relatively large, organic forms of different colors, interspersed with a sprinkling of more detailed lines or geometric shapes.  There is typically a fairly clear distinction between figure and ground in her work.  Agha was widely praised as a colorist (Imam et al.), and her work appeared to use more intense, saturated colors as her career progressed.  There are perhaps similarities in some of her works to those of Chagall and Kandinsky, but Agha’s work really does seem to stand on its own, reflecting her personal artistic vision.

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Two of Agha’s paintings, Metamorphosis from 1948, and Urban Landscape from 1982, will be subject to formal analysis here.  The former was painted by Agha very early in her career and was likely included in her first, and pioneering, solo exhibition in Karachi in 1949.  The latter is from a much later period in Agha’s career.  (It has proven extremely difficult to date many works by Agha that have been reproduced online, so we are lacking examples of her works that can be conclusively identified as coming from her mid-career period.)  Both paintings are oil on canvas.

Metamorphosis (Fig. 1) depicts, on a light grey background, several overlapping organically shaped figures, all in relatively desaturated colors.  The painting employs a closed composition that encompasses virtually all of the figures in the painting without cropping, and sets these figures against a grey ground.  Two larger grey figures set against this ground have shading that give them a sense of three-dimensional depth, and one dark section might even read as a cast shadow.  Ochre sections near the bottom of the painting serve as a kind of carpet, or possibly a puddle, on which the other forms rest.  Above, and perhaps behind, the large grey forms is a light colored section on which small shapes and figures are drawn.  It might be interpreted as a printed textile.  The shapes and figures on this apparent textile look vaguely biological: shells, birds, worms and other insects, all strung together along a loosely-drawn line.  There are other lines running throughout the figure, which in some sections appear as cables but in others serve more as a means to frame different sections of the painting.  In the lower right of the painting, resting on what might be a brown stone, we see what is arguably the most clearly-identifiable object in the painting: a leaf.  Taking in the painting as a whole, the resulting “soup” of indeterminate lifeforms fits the title’s reference to a change in form, perhaps in the sense of biological evolution.  Although we may not be able to unambiguously specify the concept it is intended to illustrate, the work does seem to be a good example of Agha’s process of “painting ideas.”

Urban Landscape (Fig. 4), painted over 30 years later, has some similarities to Metamorphosis but also reflects some of the changes in Agha’s work that transpired over the course of her career.  Again we see some larger, organic, abstract shapes dotted with smaller, more recognizable figurative elements.  There is again a hint of three-dimensional depth in the composition, though it is achieved primarily by occlusion (for example, the vase in the foreground) rather than by shading.  Indeed, the painting is much flatter than Metamorphosis in its use of tone or value.  It is not clear, for example, whether the teal ground in the bottom half of the painting is supposed to read as a receding surface on which the figures in the painting rest, or instead as a flat block of color in the picture plane.  The colors in this painting, in addition to being applied in flatter blocks, are more vibrant than in Metamorphosis, in keeping with a general trend in her work over time noted by many observers.  Not only are the colors more saturated, but the palette is distinctly vibrant in its use of complementary orange-red and teal-blue colors.  The most recognizable figurative elements in this painting are all plant-like, most notably what seems fairly clearly to be a palm tree near the center.  There are also three circular objects embedded in a broader swath of red-orange that have dark centers, which could depict eggs, or cells.  Again, then, we see references to biological elements in this painting as were seen in Metamorphosis.  Unlike that painting, though, in Urban Landscape the organic forms that are the primary focus of the work are juxtaposed with some elements that appear more geometric, such as the brown rectangles set against an occluded red square in the lower left of the painting, that may reflect the urban backdrop referenced in the painting's title.  As a broad generalization, this later painting appears to make greater use of contrast, both in color and in form, than did Metamorphosis.

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1. Zubeida Agha, Metamorphosis, 1948, oil on canvas.

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2. Zubeida Agha, Karachi by Night, 1956, oil on board.

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3. Zubeida Agha, Midnight, 1979, oil on canvas.

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4. Zubeida Agha, Urban Landscape, 1982, oil on canvas.

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5. Zubeida Agha, A Window, 1984, oil on canvas.

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Figure 1. Zubeida Agha, Metamorphosis, 1948, Khaas Gallery, Islamabad, Pakistan. Image courtesy of Khaas Gallery.

Figure 2. Zubeida Agha, Karachi by Night, 1956, oil on board, 30 x 26.5 inches.  Image from Newsline Magazine, August 2017, https://newslinemagazine.com/magazine/new-directions/  Accessed November 20, 2020.

Figure 3. Zubeida Agha, Midnight, 1979, oil on canvas, 10 1/5 × 40 inches, Khaas Gallery, Islamabad, Pakistan. Image courtesy of Khaas Gallery.

Figure 4. Zubeida Agha, Urban Landscape, 1982, oil on canvas, 30 x 36 inches, Khaas Gallery, Islamabad, Pakistan. Image courtesy of Khaas Gallery.

Figure 5. Zubeida Agha, A Window, 1984, oil on canvas, 53.6 inches by 23.6 inches, Lahore Museum, Lahore, Pakistan.  Image from Google Arts & Culture, https://artsandculture.google.com/asset/a-window/0wGf76AA485zig?hl=en-GB Accessed October 20, 2020.

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Agha, Zubeida. [Notes on Pakistani Art and Artists]. https://aaa.org.hk/archive/194903

Agha, Zubeida. [UNESCO Fellowship Report].  1970. https://aaa.org.hk/archive/192913

Ali, Salwat. “The grand dame of Pakistani art.”  Dawn, 25 Jan 2015.  https://www.dawn.com/news/1158908/the-grande-dame-of-pakistani-art Accessed October 15, 2020.

Art Galleries, Society of Contemporary Art Twelfth Anniversary 1974. Rawalpindi: Art Galleries, Society of Contemporary Art, 1974. https://aaa.org.hk/archive/193899 Accessed October 15, 2020.

Gupta, Atreyee. "Dwelling in Abstraction: Post-Partition Segues into Post-War Art." Third Text 31.2-3 (2017): 433-457.  Taylor & Francis  https://doi.org/10.1080/09528822.2017.1382064

Husain, Marjorie. “An art history to be proud of.” Mag the Weekly, 29 Sep – 5 Oct 2018, http://magtheweekly.com/detail/4310-an-art-history-to-be-proud-of Accessed October 15, 2020.

Imam, Ali, et al. “Tributes to Zubeida Agha.” Arts & the Islamic World, no. 32, 1997 Special Volume 1997, p. 64. EBSCOhost, http://search.ebscohost.com.proxy.lib.uwaterloo.ca/login.aspx?direct=true&db=aft&AN=505827642&site=ehost-live&scope=site  Accessed October 15, 2020.

Naseer, Rabbya. “Zubeida Agha.”  Aware, https://awarewomenartists.com/en/artiste/zubeida-agha/  Accessed October 15, 2020.

Nelson-Sirhandi, Marcella. “Agha, Zubeida.”  Grove Art Online, 26 May 2010, Oxford University Press, https://doi.org/10.1093/gao/9781884446054.article.T001127

“Painters of Pakistan: Latest stamp series.” Business Recorder, Aug 26 2006,  https://fp.brecorder.com/2006/08/20060826468384/ Accessed October 15, 2020.

Press Information Department (Foreign Publicity Branch). "Press Information Department (Foreign Publicity Branch) — Zubeida Agha's Paintings."  1955.  https://aaa.org.hk/archive/195531

Rizvi, Nafisa. “Flood.” Dawn, 29 March 2015.  https://www.dawn.com/news/1171995/flood Accessed October 15, 2020.

Ryzik, Melena.  “The Guerrilla Girls, After 3 Decades, Still Rattling Art World Cages.” New York Times, August 5, 2105.  https://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/09/arts/design/the-guerrilla-girls-after-3-decades-still-rattling-art-world-cages.html Accessed November 25, 2020.

Yusaf, Ilona. “Custodian of a Legacy - the Collection of Agha Arshad Ali.” June 2010, Nukta Art, https://www.thefreelibrary.com/COLLECTOR+-+Custodian+of+a+Legacy+-+the+Collection+of+Agha+Arshad+Ali.-a0243264394 Accessed October 18, 2020 via The Free Library.

“Zubeida Agha.” Khaas Gallery website.  https://khaasgallery.com/artist/zubeida-agha/ Accessed October 15, 2020.

Zubeida Agha Archive at the Asia Art Archive: https://aaa.org.hk/en/collections/search/archive/zubeida-agha-archive