In the beginning — portraits and landscapes

Araeen’s awareness of Western art as an autonomous practice started in a library. He recalls how in 1952, walking down the street in Karachi, he found himself standing ‘in front of the iron gate of a large premises with a beautiful bungalow inside’. This establishment was the library of the United States Information Service, a world-wide organization that projected the public image of the USA in allied countries. Pakistan was one of the earliest sites for the establishment of a USIS branch. At first, Araeen was taken with the fact that the library had air conditioning and freely available water from a water cooler. Then he became interested in the ‘Sketch Club’, a weekly gathering of artists who did life drawing. Later, a friend he made at the ‘Sketch Club’ introduced him to a Sunday gathering of local artists with a similar program. This was to be the primary education in art that Araeen received. Most of the portraits and landscapes that you see here were made during the ‘Sketch Club’ or ‘Artists Club’ sessions.

The library also played a decisive role in Araeen’s choice of professional education. In 1955, he discovered a book on Frank Lloyd Wright, the American architect most famous for his landmark building for the Guggenheim Museum in New York. Wright’s work made such an impression on Araeen that he decided to become an architect, but there was no training available in Karachi and Araeen had to settle for civil engineering. It is unclear if the book on Wright had any photographs of the Guggenheim’s interior, but the spiraling forms would manifest themselves in Araeen’s subsequent, largely abstract, work.