Biography
Sadequain was born in Amroha (Uttar Pradesh), India, in 1930. He was raised in a traditional, middle-class Shia Muslim family in North India. He received his early education in Imam-ul-Madaris in Amroha, where generations of his forefathers studied and learned the art of calligraphy. He was among the seventh generation of calligraphers and bookbinders in his family. After completing tenth grade in Amroha, Sadequain joined his brother at the All-India Radio service in Delhi, where he worked from 1944 to 1946 as a calligrapher copyist,- copying poetic selections for singers and performers. At the end of British rule in the Indian subcontinent in 1947, which resulted in the historic partition of India and Pakistan, Sadequain studied art history and geography at Agra University. In 1948, after his graduation, he migrated to Karachi. The information about Sadequain’s whereabouts between 1948–1954 is not much known, except that he briefly lived in Quetta and launched his artistic career with his first solo show of paintings in Quetta Town Hall in 1954. The year 1955 became a turning point for Sadequain’s artistic career. His solo exhibition held at Huseyn Shaheed Suhrawardy’s (Minister of Foreign Affairs of Pakistan) residence in Karachi, entitled The Exhibition of Unknown Artist, earned him overnight fame and resulted in him receiving his first commissioned project of painting a mural in Karachi’s Jinnah Hospital, after which he continued to receive several prestigious commissions from the government of Pakistan. During 1955–1960, Sadequain experimented with and incorporated various artistic movements, including realism, abstraction, and Bengal School. As he was not formally trained in any art school, his knowledge of Western art movements was only gained through books and magazines.
Since Sadequain came from a family of calligraphists, his strong bond to text was natural. In one of his 1985 interviews for Quetta Radio Station, he stated that he was a born calligraphist. Instead of using printed textbooks for his school, he used to illustrate all of his textbooks, including handwriting the text and drawing illustrations and atlases. His association with Urdu text made its way into his paintings as he incorporated the poetry of two famous poets of the 19th and 20th centuries, Mirza Asad Ullah Ghalib (1797–1869) and Muhammad Iqbal (1877–1938), as well as his poetry.
Between 1957 and 1958, Sadequain’s retreat to the barren lands of Gadani (35 miles west of Karachi) in solitude profoundly affected his artistic works. The desolate landscape of Gadani, with its tall cacti and dry earth, inspired and moved him towards using exaggerated linearity in his lifetime’s work. For him, the vertical form of the cacti resonated with the forms in Kufic calligraphy. Sadequain expanded the tradition of Islamic calligraphy by merging it with human forms.
Although Sadequain was a great draftsman, he preferred painting caricature-like, elongated melting anthropomorphic figures fused with the natural form of cacti, making it difficult to discern one from the other. This new approach opened up endless possibilities for experimentation in his paintings and mural projects. His use of muscular human forms represented man’s strong will and his struggle to conquer the forces of evil and harness nature. Sadequain worked with oil colours, flatly applying a limited palette of blues, ochres, and greys on surfaces such as paper, canvas, marble, wood, leather, glass, and anything else he could get his hands on. Besides his black, jagged, unbroken lines, he scratched the surface of his paintings to mimic the texture of the cacti.
In the second Paris Biennale of 1961, Sadequain won the award of outstanding painter for his painting The Last Supper in the Artists Under 35 category. The biennale awarded him a scholarship to live in Paris, where he stayed for seven years. His stay in Paris allowed him to exhibit his work in France, other European countries, and the United States. In 1964, he was awarded one of the most critical and challenging commissions in Paris by the Les Bibliophiles de l’Automobile-Club de France to illustrate the Nobel Prize winner, Algerian–born French author Albert Camus’s L’Étranger. Sadequain created 35 images for the book: 22 colour lithographs for the key scenes in the text and 13 monochrome lithographs to mark the end of each chapter. There were only 150 editions printed by the Paris atelier of Jacques Desjobert, which also printed works of Pablo Picasso (1881–1973), Salvador Dali (1904–1989), Marc Chagall (1887–1985), and Henry Matisse (1869–1954). During this time, Sadequain regularly visited Pakistan for his commissioned works and exhibitions.
In 1968, Sadequain returned to Pakistan and immersed himself in painting and writing poetry. In 1970, he published a volume of over a thousand ruba’is (poems or verses) as a Muraqqa (album of Islamic paintings and poetry) comprising two editions, called Rubaiyyat: Rubaiyyat-e-Sadequain Naqqash, in which he calligraphed and illustrated the ruba’is. The Literary Society of Pakistan awarded first prize for his book.
After the 1970s, Sadequain’s work shifted from modernist abstract calligraphic designs to traditionally penned poetic and Quranic verses integrating appropriate pictorial motifs.
He earned a broader appeal among the public and the state, receiving high appreciation and support from President Zulfikar Ali Bhutto (1928–1979) and later Zia ul Haq’s (1924–1988) regime. By this time, he had also established his reputation as a national artist and liked to call himself a Fakir (Sufi). He worked feverishly on monumental scales of murals and showed no interest in using art as a money-making business. He was convinced that his art was for ordinary people. Therefore, he freely made and distributed his drawings far and wide to those who gathered around him while he was painting his monumental murals. Although Sadequain’s calligraphic work was in perfect alliance with the Islamisation of Pakistan, his intention was not to create works that functioned as instruments of Islamisation. One such evidence of his nonconformist and subversive approach can be observed in his 1976 exhibition held at the Pakistan Arts Council Lahore. The exhibition that the right-wingers bombed featured 80 figurative works, including illustrations of rubaiyat-quatrains.
From the 1980s to the end of his life, Sadequain’s work overtly became Islamic when he started painting stylised Quranic verses devoid of any figurative images. His most well-known work from this era includes three different series of paintings of Sura-e-Rehman (made in 1970, 1974, and 1981). Sadequain liberated the alphabet from its traditional bondage to words and, thus, composed his calligraphic paintings while sustaining the actual shape and form of individual letters.
Sadequain returned to figurative painting in his last mural project at Frere Hall Karachi, titled Man and his Universe. At the time of his death in 1987, the project was only three-fourths completed. Nevertheless, it was installed on the ceiling of Frere Hall Karachi. For Sadequain, painting, calligraphy, and poetry were interconnected — each feeding into the other. He opined that painting enabled him to enhance his aesthetics and skills in calligraphy.
Sadequain painted more than 45 murals on permanent display in Pakistan (the State Bank of Pakistan Museum Karachi; Power House at Mangla Dam; the Lahore Museum,; Punjab University; Punjab Public Library; the Frere Hall in Karachi), India (Aligarh Muslim University; Indian Institute of Islamic Research, Delhi; Ghalib Institute, Delhi; Banaras Hindu University; National Geophysical Research Institute), the Middle East (Power House Um-ul-Naar in Abu Dhabi), Europe, and North America. Sadequain’s paintings are in the Metropolitan Museum of Art New York, Royal Ontario Museum Toronto, Museum of Modern Art Paris, and many other museums and private collections worldwide.
