KARACHI: For over 40 years Sadequain’s monumental masterpiece Treasures of Time has adorned the premises of the State Bank of Pakistan in Karachi. Now this mega mural has been loaned to the Mohatta Palace Museum, Clifton, for a retrospective of the major non-calligraphic works of Pakistan’s most enigmatic painter.
Titled The Holy Sinner: Sadequain 1955-1987, this exhibition is scheduled to open for public viewing in March. The largest Sadequain exhibit ever mounted anywhere, it includes more than 200 paintings, lithographs, sketches and murals from both public and private collections across Pakistan.
Fully aware that Sadequain is best known for his calligraphic feats of the 70’s and 80’s, the curators of this Mohatta Palace exhibit chose to forego their inclusion. Instead they have chosen to exhibit the earlier figurative works of this prolific painter’s vast ouvre.
It is the consensus of all serious art critics and historians that it is indeed these remarkable paintings, sketches, lithographs and murals that are the quintessence of Sadequain. The often-puzzling products of the period of his greatest creative innovation, these works tend to be dismissed as bizarre by the uninitiated. Actually they are the most imaginative works he has left us.
Painter prolific: During his lifetime, Sadequain was a charismatic public figure, the most written about painter in the Pakistani press. Prodigiously prolific, he had amazing creative energy; he produced thousands of paintings and calligraphies, as well as large murals in public buildings.
He was also a serious rubai poet, a genre which is dying out for the simple reason that rubai demands of a practitioner a very rich grounding in the classics.
His Rubaiyat-i-Sadequain is unique in Urdu poetry. A self- taught artist, Sadequain never attended any art school. Though he had no background of academic training, his innate ability and remarkable eye placed him as a talent of the greatest magnitude.
Sadequain experimented with several artistic styles before finding his own distinct personal style. He is credited with creating a new genre, Calligraphic Calligraphy.
In his youth he eagerly devoured prints of great paintings. He was exhilarated by the stylish innovations of modern art and delved deep into its meaning. The explorations of contemporary European artists and Picasso’s Cubist masterpieces provided technical models for his early works.
In a career spanning some three decades, Sadequain was the recipient of numerous prestigious awards such as the Tamgha-i-Imtiaz and the President’s Pride of Performance Award. He gained international recognition when he won the coveted Laureate Biennale de Paris in 1961. Later he was invited to illustrate Nobel Prize winner Albert Camus’s famous novel The Outsider (L’Etanger), translated in the US as The Stranger).
The Unknown Sadequain: Though more people in Pakistan have heard of Sadequain than of any other artist in the country, most tend to associate him with ingenious, often striking renderings of Quranic verses. This is understandable because Sadequain repeatedly emphasized his devotion for calligraphy. “Calligraphy is in my blood, my forefathers were calligraphers,” he said. In the last 18 years of his life Sadequain more or less gave up his art for calligraphy.
Sadly, what is often forgotten is that long before Sadequain’s calligraphy made him a national celebrity, he was a great visual artist, one of the most original and revolutionary artists of the country.
He took his painting very seriously. Picture making, he declared, is different from painting. In painting you think. He rejected naturalistic imitation firmly. In an interview he said people ask why I don’t paint flowers and butterflies. I tell them that I am after reality. I am not a drawing-room artist. I am a painter of the dustbin, of the gutter.
There can be little doubt of the secure place which Sadequain holds among the connoisseurs and art lovers of our generation or among the professional purveyors of art.
Monumental murals: Sadequain’s once wearily quipped that he had painted more square inches in his career than the great Michelangelo. His was no idle boast as the area covered by a single one of his huge murals, the massive Saga of Labour in the Mangla Dam’s Powerhouse, is almost one-tenth of an acre.
In Pakistan, Sadequain pioneered the art of public mural making. He had hungrily pored over Picasso reproductions in his youth and was familiar with the celebrated mural Guernica, the masterly Spaniard’s violent denunciation of the fascist bombardment of an unarmed Basque city during the Spanish Civil War.
While Sadequain’s youthful assimilation of Cubist theories is evident in many of his early paintings - he has been called Pakistan’s Picasso - his murals tend to be comparatively more realistic and representational.
Like Diego Rivera and the other great members of the Mexican mural movement, Sadequain includes explicit social commentary and combines in his mega-mural modern forms and realism with great effectiveness.
The huge mural Sadequain painted for the Karachi Airport’s terminal has sadly disappeared without a trace but the smaller one donated to Jinnah Hospital survives. Les Baigneuses, in the collection of the Karachi Press Club was executed in 1958 and is on display in the Mohatta Palace Museum exhibit. The bathers depicted in this Picassoesque mural are in their voluptuous proportions as robust as those in Renoir’s Les Grandes Baigneusses (The Great Bathers).
In 1959 Sadequain was commissioned to produce giant-sized murals for the Central Excise Land Customs Club. In that year he also painted Quest for Knowledge, a surrealist-influenced mural in which the head of the horses are replaced by time clocks. The Daliesque painting has been loaned by the Services Club to the Mohatta Palace Museum.
In May 1998 Begum Aamna Majeed Malik generously bequeathed a diptych in memory of her late husband, Colonel Majeed Malik, to the Mohatta Palace Museum. This superb mural, called The Last Revelation was commissioned for the PECHS School, Karachi, in 1968.
In all, a total of eight murals have been selected by the indefatigable curators of this major Sadequain retrospective.
Aerodynamics of a Skyscape painted in May 1967 comes courtesy of the Travel Corporation (Pvt) Ltd., while two magnificent murals, Treasures of Time, and The Laboratories of the Natural Universe are from the collection of the State Bank of Pakistan. Painted in 1961, these famous murals mark a high point in Sadequain’s entire ouvre.
Treasures of Time, 62-foot long and 8-foot high, is undoubtedly a mural art tour de force. Painted in the classical style in a luminous blue and gray colour scheme, it shows the compositional complexity of a master. Its theme is the intellectual advance of humanity, so in it Sadequain has portrayed (realistically!) great thinkers from Socrates, Plato, Aristotle to Einstein and Iqbal. Behind Galileo looms the Leaning Tower of Pisa and in the centre sits Buddha. Mischievously, the artist has given the Enlightened One Sadequain’s face.
Fully one-third of this mural is devoted to the depiction of the Light of Islam. Great Muslim thinkers and the leading lights of Western civilization share the vast area of this magnificent work.
While Treasures of Time shows the great torch-bearers of human knowledge from the earliest to the latest, Sadequain’s monumental mural at Mangla, the truly enormous Saga of Labour, portrays the march of human civilization from the hewers of wood and breakers of stones to the travellers of space and conquerors of the moon and stars.
Illustrating man’s progress from food gatherer to the invention of the wheel, it includes the development of agriculture, handicrafts and machinery. Beginning with Iqbal’s verse on Farhad, this majestic mural ends with Iqbal’s reference to other worlds beyond the stars. Covering an area of 180 feet by 23 feet, it is by far the largest mural ever painted in Pakistan.
The powerhouse at Mangla Dam is inaccessible to most people. Unfortunately, the gargantuan dimensions of the Saga of Labour rule out any chance of it being ever displayed at Mohatta or for the matter any other museum in Pakistan.
Illustrating Ghalib, Iqbal and Faiz: For lovers of Urdu poetry, the Mohatta Palace Museum exhibit should be an extraordinary visual treat. The highlight for them will undoubtedly be Sadequain’s highly individualistic illustrations of Urdu literature’s leading lights, namely, Ghalib, Iqbal and Faiz.
Ghalib, surrounded by constant carnage, wrote a poetry primarily of losses and consequent grief; a poetry also of what was, what could have been possible, but was no longer. In sensibility, it is a poetry that is meditative, full of reverberations, couched in a language at once sparkling and fastidious. He is a tragic poet.
Yet because Ghalib is a giant among Urdu poets, artists have bravely attempted to portray his heart-wrenching lines. Sadequain first exhibited 25 illustrations of the verses of Ghalib in November 1968. Later, he painted several more masterpieces, 50 in all, for the Ghalib-century celebrations.
This was by no means the first time an artist had tried to give a visual form to his immortal lines. When some works of Abdur Rahman Chughtai (1894-1975) were published in the form of a book of illustrations to the verses of Ghalib, they were widely acclaimed.
Coming some forty years after the publication in 1928 of Chughtai’s illustrated edition called Muraqqa-i-Chughtai, Sadequain’s paintings were a very different interpretation of the verses.
In contrast to the soft, delicate and poetical water-colour paintings of Chughtai, Sadequain’s large oil paintings are dramatic, dark and sombre. There is vigour in his strong black lines and drama in the strong contrasts of light and dark areas. The sparing use of colour, mostly light blue or blue-green against dark brown or dark blue is apt as Ghalib’s lines are often tragic.
THE LAST MURAL: Karachi is fortunate that Sadequain has left here his last and most gigantic masterpiece to decorate the ceiling and wall curvatures of the huge Frere Hall, wrote S. Amjad Ali in his obituary for the artist.
This painting of heroic dimensions whose theme is The Universe of Earth and Heaven (Al-Ardh-wa-Sama) is in the form of 100 hardboard panels measuring 8 feet by 4 feet, covering a total area of 3,200 square feet. Of these 100 panels, 87 are complete.
Sadequain was thus more than halfway through this stupendous mural when the icy hands of death snatched him from us... As the poet Robert Burns put it. The best-laid schemes of mice and men, Gang aft a gley.
