KARACHI: An exhibition of the iconic artist and poet Sadequain’s artworks with special reference to his ruba’iyat (quatrains) began at the Institute of Business Administration (IBA) on Sunday evening.

The exhibition was preceded by a seminar titled ‘Sadequain in Koocha-i-Khayyam’. IBA director Dr Ishrat Husain welcomed the guests. He said the country which did not honour and remember its artists, poets and writers was not going to go very far. He made the point that studying liberal arts turned young people into well-rounded humans.

Sibtain Naqvi shed light on Sadequain’s relationship with poetry. He put it down to the fact that the painter was born in 1930 in Amroha that produced artists of the calibre of filmmaker Kamal Amrohvi and poet Jaun Elia. He said there was a high culture environment in the city which was why Sadequain was exposed to the art of verse writing at an early age.

Mr Naqvi, a grandson of the late artist, showed some of Sadequain’s works and tried to explain them to the audience. He commented that with Sadequain letters became words and words became images. As regard to the artist’s disposition, he claimed he considered himself one of the masses. He also touched upon the issue that nowadays some fake or duplicate artworks of the artist were being put on display, and events such as the seminar could help in tackling and rectifying the problem.

The title of Fakir S. Aijazuddin’s talk was ‘Sadequain: A Domestic Exile’. In the most incisive presentation of the programme, he divided Sadequain’s body of work into the following categories: portraitist, narcissist, masochist, fatalist, coreligionist, classicist, socialist, lyricist, copyist, muralist, calligraphist and artist. He began his argument by stating that the artist came from a lineage of calligraphers and that the tradition of side-by-side painting and calligraphy was not a new one — it existed from the Mughal era. He said Sadequain began his career as a painter. He went to Paris in 1960 and one year later was put on the international map. There he was strongly influenced by cubism, and things changed when he returned as he now made “direct social comment”. By 1966 Sadequain was very famous, because of which at the age 36 he had his first retrospective, he said.

After giving a brief biographical sketch of the artist, Mr Aijazuddin spoke on the different categories, one by one, that he had mentioned earlier, backing up his arguments by showing pictures of Sadequain’s paintings made in different eras. For example, discussing him as a narcissist he showed an image in which the artist is looking at himself in a mirror; or as a socialist his painting of a family of artisans. As a copyist, he pointed out, Sadequain copied his own and other people’s works. He clarified there was nothing wrong with that as long as you acknowledged your source of inspiration. To drive his point home, he showed one of Picasso’s paintings featuring a bull in it, and then Sadequain’s with a similar image. As a calligraphist, he remarked: “Sadequain could make letters dance with grace.”

Art critic Niilofur Farrukh read out a paper on ‘decoding the painscape’. She said she first met Sadequain in 1970 at the Arts Council, where he would sit every day and meet people. She then spoke on the launch of his first collection of ruba’iyat and commented that his “ruba’iyat are relevant to his art”. She said man on the street was his enduring muse.

Dr Nomanul Haq was the last speaker of the evening. His subject: ‘Sadequain in the alley of Omar Khayyam’. He first drew the attention of the attendees to the artist’s fondness for Urdu poet Ghalib, saying Sadequain chose some extraordinary verses of the poet to illustrate. He was of the view that the artist had created equivalence between poetics and the art of painting, which earned him a distinguished position in the art world. Sometimes he would move from poetry to painting, sometimes from painting to poetry, and sometimes both would happen together, he said.

After that Dr Noman shifted his focus to the eminent Persian poet Omar Khayyam, who was famous for his quatrains, a genre that Sadequain too preferred to express himself in. He said there was a certain meaningful playfulness (shokhi) in Khayyam’s poetry, a characteristic which could be found in Sadequain’s quatrains as well. And both were prolific, he added.

In the end, eminent actor Talat Husain recited some of Sadequain’s quatrains.

The exhibition for which artworks have been given by Sultan Naqvi, a nephew of Sadequain, will continue for a week. One of the paintings on display has the following quatrain on it: Angusht jab a’daad ke gham sehti ho Tum ho ke nahin, jab ye khalish rehti ho Ik jaan si phir jaan mein aa jaati hai Tum phone per jab khud hi hello kehti ho (When the fingers face the numbers’ tyranny When the question, ‘Are you there?’ unsettles me At that moment, your ‘hello’ on the phone Gives me a new lease of life, I feel relieved)

Published in Dawn, October 6th , 2015

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