In 1914 French painter Georges Braque went to war. As one of the fathers of Cubism, he changed the course of art itself, stunning critics and leaving Picasso jealous. But when a battered Braque returned from the trenches, with a head wound that took years to heal, he abandoned innovation and retreated inwards. To this day, many wonder: what if Braque hadn’t enlisted? What would he have had in store for us?
We are standing at the VM Art gallery, on a February evening. It is a retrospective honouring the late Pakistani-American artist Lubna Agha, who left Karachi for California in 1981. She was the beautiful visionary of the 1970’s, creator of the ‘White Paintings’, the “meteor” that hit Karachi according to Dr Akbar Naqvi. Yusuf Agha, her husband and biggest fan, wishes Pakistan remembered her for more than those paintings - but how can you ignore them? Even at the VM gallery recently, the White series has the pull of a movie star. One of Lubna’s collectors painted a wall of his home black to enhance the drama of the painting. Fascinating concoctions of lines and shapes, they boggled and intrigued. “Is it a nipple?” - men found them titillating: the reds and curves oozing flesh. Others called them ‘emotional’. Master painter Mansoor Rahi says the magic was in the placement of the “void areas” - the silent spaces, or in simpler words, the empty spots in her painting. Lubna, he said, was a genius before she knew it.
'Three Days' - a piece from 1994
Art students were in awe of Lubna, tall and glamorous in a male kurta and waistcoat
As you enter the show, a bright tunnel has sketches, reviews and photographs from Lubna’s life. Lubna, née Latif, was born in Quetta in 1949. Her grandparents were published writers and her mother was a skilled embroiderer (perhaps that is why Lubna’s later canvases have a hint of a Sindhi rilli). In the 1960’s she enrolled at the Zuberi sisters’ Karachi School of Art, her teachers fondly remember a pretty girl, focused as a laser. Lubna spent almost a month with artist couple Rahi and Hajra on a class trip to Naran, painting landscapes under Kaghan’s clouds. Rahi cherishes that time and his ‘brightest student’. Years later, Lubna would paint trees - but of a different kind.
Modernist Ahmed Parvez was so impressed that he made Lubna part of the famous “Three Non-Depressionists”. The show’s playful poster evokes a different time, the artists staring you down , presenting their works. These rebels hurled colour when Pakistani artists had murky canvases (Sadequain, Naqsh, and Gulgee liked their palettes simpler). Critic Niilofur Farrukh said Parvez was always on the brink of pushing colour further and Lubna admitted he opened her eyes to its power.
'Doli' - oil on canvas
Art students were in awe of Lubna, tall and glamorous in a male kurta and waistcoat. But others noticed her too. In 1971 the late, heroic Herald editor, Razia Bhatti asked a young writer to cover an exhibition of a “painter with a fresh approach to art”. The painter was Lubna, the writer her future husband. After their meeting, Yusuf faked reasons to see her - borrowing books, appearing at shows ‘by chance’, pretending to be ‘passing by’ while she painted murals for the Habib Bank Plaza. Yusuf moved to Lahore, and like a movie hero, took night trains to see her. His senior officer threatened to suspend him if he bunked, but “wild horses couldn’t keep me away”. They married in 1974 and honeymooned in Abbottabad.
Today, Yusuf is still the smitten suitor. He greets every visitor, the show is a labour of love. Looking closely, Lubna’s story can be traced in the retrospective - her restlessness after success, changing continents, becoming a mother and later a graphic designer. Her white paintings erupt into (what Yusuf calls) the “Joy Series” after their son is born: jumbled bodies appear from simplified compositions under California’s sky, and grid-like structures coincide with her career in computer graphics. When the Aghas moved to the US, her figures floated and her trees grew above ground, echoing her feeling of an immigrant blowing in the wind. It is an incongruous image from the one of a 1971 Lubna, regal in her sari, flanked by Faiz at her show.
'Sarajevo 1996'
Lubna's colours make brutality and dismembered limbs palatable
“We never forgot her, and she never forgot her origins,” critic Marjorie Husain was as excited as the rest of the art world when Lubna returned in 1996 after almost a decade. The works were bursting with life - roots, trees, fish and flesh, on surfaces that rippled like waves. Like the song “Gimme Hope Jo’anna”, whose sunny tune belies its bitterness, Lubna’s colours make brutality and dismembered limbs palatable. Figures cower, dismembered bodies lie in a crimson mishmash. Fearlessly she adds text – ‘Fragmentation’, ‘disintegration’. She brought North American landscapes home: snowy, leafless trees, California’s rolling terrain, etc. Whereas the 1970’s were about the silences in a canvas, these paintings were boisterous and overflowing.
Before leaving Pakistan, she invited Ali Imam, Rahi, Hajra and Akbar Naqvi to a viewing of her new work. Imam Sahib warned her that people would find it hard to move past her White Paintings. But Lubna’s homecoming was triumphant. Her haunting “Doli” resides in the permanent collection in Bradford’s Cartwright Hall. Part funeral procession, part feminist manifesto - a defeated bride is carried by pall bearers. Painted with her diagonal brushstrokes it has the powerful simplicity of the 70’s.
'Janamaz', from 2001
Lubna’s art statement reads like a letter to a friend. No pretensions or cryptic comparisons to oysters or vessels here, just a wide eyed keenness to explain herself. But in 2000, some felt lost. Icons and graphical elements left some longing for her earlier mystery. “Some say Lubna didn’t realise,” Zohra Husain, Chawkandi Art gallery says, “that Pakistan had changed.” In reality, Lubna’s lament was that Pakistan had changed - enslaved by foreign institutions, sacred symbols cheapened, the bubble of the 1970’s shattered. She even missed the camaraderie among Pakistan’s artist fraternity which now bordered on pugnacious.
On a cool February evening, a symposium was held to celebrate her, featuring Niilofur Farrukh and Asif Noorani, a paper by scholar Dr Marcella Sirhandi, former chairman of advertising agency JWT Anwar Rammal, and Yusuf Agha. They discuss her journey, their friendships, but Yusuf - the one who misses her “light” - brings the retrospective to life. Lubna’s latest work, made while quietly battling cancer, is unveiled to Pakistan. Navigating bazaars and palaces in Turkey in 2000, Lubna was inspired by Muslim artisans’ repetitive strokes “like a believer’s chant in prayer”. Yusuf recounts that exact moment and shows us every speckle. Her creations, on canvas gleefully mingle the Arabic and Urdu nukta with the pointillism of Seurat. Sirhandi, who curated the show for the Gardiner Art Gallery in Oklahoma, said the meticulous pattern making gave Lubna a sense of peace. It would be her last series.
Solo show in Oklahoma's Gardiner gallery
What do we owe the person whose presence, exit and return were moments in Pakistan’s art history? Rabia Zuberi stepped up to honour her “daughter” and one of KSA’s brightest by opening a gallery in her name. With Pakistani masters vaulted in drawing rooms, you would think art students would be clamoring to see the show, but it was the opposite. When Yusuf went searching for Lubna’s murals, he faced red tape and indifference.
Lubna Agha was never complacent; and it is seldom that artists transform, risking the small pie that is the art market. On the 6th of May, she would have been 67. Standing amongst her luscious works, you had to wonder, what if she had stayed?
Zehra Hamdani Mirza is a writer and painter based in Karachi
