Sadequain’s charisma

Looking back at the artist’s life on his 36th death anniversary

Karachi: Sadequain’s charismatic artworks’ alluring quality will mesmerize the art world with their dramatic and philosophical treatment forever. His artworks in every genre of art fascinate and awaken a response in the viewers. Sadequians glamour entices people to visit the gallery where his artworks are displayed.

The fame he got, did not affect his work or his personality. In fact his passion and affection for art, remained with him till his death on 10 February 1987.

His talent and desire led him to the world of art where he will remain as a shinning star. He was an artist who lived for art. Art was like a lifeline for him as he was not a very social person. He preferred to live in the world of his art and also died in it.

Pulsating with life’s philosophy, his unique work possesses virtue of much more excitement and romance. His work is not derived from any Eastern or Western source as he was a self-taught artist and never attended any art school. His talent led him the way forward and he forged a style of his own. His ideas and perspective are hidden in the lines, textures and symbols, which he used in the paintings, which transformed his paintings into a signature work of art.

Sadequain was an energetic, innovative and a restless soul. He truly was a social interpreter. Majority of his artworks address a common theme of social and cultural values. Most of his paintings, especially murals depict a man’s struggle, his achievements and a persistent quest for knowledge and to discover his endless potential. His murals are full of activity, ideas, and they read like an unfolding story about their particular theme.

Born in 1930 at Amroha (India), Sadequain was a very socially conscious artist who felt the ills and evils, the tragedies and sufferings of life very acutely. After living for some time in a wild spot on the shores of Karachi, called Gadani, where the cactus grows wild in the harsh desert conditions, he adopted this thorny plant as a symbol of man’s struggle and surviving in the most adverse conditions. He was also a prolific inventor of wholly original abstract designs which he used to decorate his murals. He was not much of a colourist. Most of his work is grey and colourless. However, the murals on the ceilings of the Lahore Museum and Frere Hall are brilliantly colourful, though without tonal variations or merging of colours.

He also made many ‘modern’ pictures portraying ambiguous images of people looking like things and things looking like people. For ordinary normal expression, the model in his mind was highly conventional. He painted women and even men in dance poses to give his paintings a poetical look. From the beginning, his work was dominated by line work and the painting was largely flat and restricted in range of colours. Sadequain’s oil paintings were dark, harsh and crude. The sparing use of colours, mostly light blue or blue-green against dark brown or dark blue, hardly changed the basic linear character of his work. Most of the themes were tragic and therefore, the paintings were aptly dark and dramatic, colourless and sombre.

His style changed completely after he was adjudged ‘Laureate Biennale de Paris’ in 1961 by an international jury of critics. It was a painting titled ‘The Last Supper’. Instead of realistic figures, he began using thorny cactus forms or curved dagger forms with which he built up single or multiple human figures.

Early in 1965, he expressed his deep sorrow at the decadence and degeneration of life in his country by making a series of drawings and paintings in which men and women were shown on whose heads crows were making nests and laying eggs. In early 1966, he put up an exhibition of drawings in which he showed cobwebs growing all around men and women and even on themselves, suggesting decay, decline and degeneration. In the middle of 1966, he made more drawings in which, besides the crows and cobwebs, he showed rats, lizards and cockroaches crawling on men and women and even snakes entwining them, the people in trance and utterly brutalized.

The 1965 war with India led Sadequain to make a more uplifting and inspiring painting, which was actually a mural of 40 X 8 feet. In this, he showed the forces of darkness clashing with the forces of light. On one side were monsters, skeletons, carrion crows and demons, while on the other side were a healthy couple, a young mother with a child, a farmer with his plough raised up as a weapon and finally, a pregnant woman. The forces of goodness are on the offensive while the others are passive. Thus, he gave an allegorical and universal version of war rather than a particular conflict between two nations. It is obvious from his works, that Sadequain felt the sufferings and trials of man very deeply. He constantly tried to use his art for promoting tolerance and kindness, progress and enlightenment, peace and happiness.

He talked about the eternal truths related to human life and death, the vagaries of time, the transient world as well as the inevitability of death in his paintings.

Calligraphy became popular in Pakistan in 1969. From 1969 to 1985, he devoted himself to Calligraphy, for which he developed an entirely new style. He painted the different verses of the Sura-e-Rahman and made each verse into a painting. In 1960 he was awarded Tamgha-e-Imtiaz (medal). He also received President’s Medal for Pride of Performance in 1962 for his extra ordinary work in the field of art.

Sadequain painted thousands of paintings, drawings, and murals during his lifetime. He loved to distribute his work as a gift to institutions, individuals, acquaintances, including total strangers. Therefore one can find his work from a hut to a palace. He hardly ever sold his work, and mostly gave it away; sometimes his work was simply taken, and sometime even stolen. Sadequain also pays homage to three legends of classical literature – Ghalib, Iqbal and Faiz by illustrating their poetry on canvas. These works show his deep affection for art in all forms.

Sadequain had done 25 illustrations of the verses of Ghalib in large oil paintings for the first time ever, in 1968. It was forty years after the publication of Chughtai’s illustrated edition of Ghalib’s verses. With each illustration of Ghalib’s verses, Sadequain had appended a small panel on which the relevant verse was Calligraphed in Urdu. In February, 1971, he made some large drawings, paintings and calligraphies based on the verses of the poet Faiz Ahmed Faiz to mark his sixtieth birthday. Aftaab-e-Taaza, was the illustration of lines by Allama Iqbal, he made it to show his reverence towards Iqbal.