Sadequain one of the talented artists that emerged on the Pakistan art scene in mid-50s was snatched away by the cruel hands of death on 10 February, 1987. A self-taught artist - Syed Sadequain Ahmed Naqvi was born in 1930 at Amroha (India) and migrated to Pakistan after graduating in 1948 from Agra University.
He was a very socially conscious artist who felt acutely the ills and evils, the tragedies and sufferings of life. He came dramatically into prominence when his work was displayed as "The Exhibition of an Unknown Artist" in 1955 at the residence of Shaheed Suhrawardy, then Minister for Foreign Affairs.
Sadequain introduce the painting of large murals and created some thirty of such artworks, of which five are in India. All of his murals are figurative except five in Pakistan and one in India are calligraphic.
He was a prolific inventor of wholly original abstract designs which he used to decorate his murals. Some of them even suggested things like suns and stars and revolving meteors.
Most of the Sadequain's murals are in public buildings, the first of which was in Jinnah Hospital (1955) and the second at Karachi Airport (1957). He was quite capable of painting realistic faces and figures which can be seen in the above mentioned murals where he painted Sindhi and Balochi women with their long embroidered gowns, carrying water pitchers in delectable dance poses.
For ordinary normal expression, the model in his mind was highly conventional. In those days people loved art to be poetical. Sadequain, therefore painted women and even men in dance poses. From the beginning, his work was dominated by line work and the painting was largely flat and restricted in range of colours.
He was not much of a colourist and 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. In 1960 he was awarded Tamgha-e-Imtiaz (medal) and First Prize in National Exhibition. He received President's Medal for Pride of Performance in 1962.
A painting titled "The Last Supper" was adjudged "Laureate Biennale de Paris" in 1961 by an international jury of critics after which his painting style changed completely. Instead of realistic figures, he began using thorny cactus forms or curved dagger forms with which he built up single or multiple human figures. In "The Last Supper" also a row of human figures was suggestively built up in abstract form through the use of crescent shapes or curved blades or exaggerated cactus thorns.
He made many puzzle "modern" pictures portraying ambiguous images of people looking like things and things looking like people. He had to break away from these cliches in 1961 to paint the huge mural in the Head Office of the State Bank of Pakistan at Karachi, called "Time's Treasuries", in which he showed the intellectual advance of man from the time of Socrates to that of Iqbal and Einstein. This is the style that he finally adopted.
He has the honour of painting the largest mural in Pakistan entitled "The Saga of Labour"at the power house of the Mangla Dam, covering an area of 180 feet by 23 feet. The theme was the progress of man depicting men using their muscle power to break stones and conquering space and looking down upon the earth through a telescope. After the Mangla mural, in the same year (1967) Sadequain painted four murals at Lahore: two for the Punjab University Auditorium, one for the University Library and one for the Punjab Public Library.
He was a thematic painter and always painted an idea or a literary subject. He achieved fullest expression of an idea in his "Saga of Labour" mural at Mangla. For he was a painter of ideas, he never painted a portrait except once (printed on the cover of "Pakistan" Quarterly Vol. XI No 3). Although his early work shows him capable of doing good figure drawing, for some reason he adopted an almost caricaturist style in which the limbs hang limply and the outlines are wavy, the size exaggerated and the mass ponderous. In his last mural he did not even paint the hands and feet and made them look like flippers.
His work is not derived from any eastern or western source. He has his own style which was basically linear, in the tradition of all Oriental art and this is emphasised by his use of markers as a medium. One of the biggest works of Sadequain was 25 illustrations of the verses of Ghalib done in large oil paintings for the first time ever, in 1968 - coming forty years after the publication in 1928 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. That gave him the idea to use his hereditary talent in calligraphy to write and paint the verses of the Holy Quran. He heralded the advent of painterly calligraphy in Pakistan and for a decade it was the rage, with many young and old practitioners, creating a variety of work. By now, almost every artist has created some work in this field. Then he made paintings of the mellifluous and picturesque chapter of the Holy Quran - 'Sura Rahman'.
In February, 1971, he made some large drawings, paintings and calligraphies based on the verses of the poet Faiz to mark his sixtieth birthday. In 1972, he wrote the magnificent "Sura Yaseen" of the Holy Quran on 260 feet long wooden panels and donated it to the Lahore Museum. In the first half of 1973, he completed the splendid ceiling of the central gallery of the Lahore Museum, depicting the starry heavens.
The whole of 1979 was devoted to calligraphy which culminated in a large calligraphic mural that he made in Abu Dhabi. From November, 1981 to December, 1982 he was in India and during this time he made huge murals, first at the Aligarh Muslim University (in copper cut outs) and then calligraphic and figurative murals at the National Geophysical Research Institute, Hyderabad Deccan and later at the Banaras Hindu University, and finally he executed in very large size the 99 Beautiful Names of Allah (Asma-ul-Husna) in the Indian Institute of Islamic Research at New Delhi.
In early 1986 he began work on the gigantic project of paintings to cover the whole ceiling of the hall of Gallery Sadequain, 140 x 70 feet. and also the cornice bordering the ceiling. This huge mural entitled "Al-ardh-o-was-samawaat" (The Earth and the Heavens) was made up of figurative paintings, decorative designs and some calligraphy. It was to be painted on 100 hardboard panels of 8 x 4 feet but he had barely completed 87 panels (total area 2,784 sq. feet) when he departed for eternal life.
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