Revision as of 19:54, 17 November 2013

Sadequain

Public Murals: Art without social barriers

By Niilofur Farrukh

Dawn

In the early epochs, art reached its peak in the public realm when artists of the great civilisations created monumental art that survived time and gave it a tangible identity.

Some 20th century artists have tried to resurrect this ethos to acknowledge and engage the masses though mural art.

Two Mexican artists of the 20th century, Diego Rivera (1886-1957) and Jose Clemente Orozco (1883-1949) were active members of the Muralist Movement that was part of the Mexican Renaissance.

Located in the 17th century baroque building of the Government Palace in Guardalajara, Orozco’s mural dominates the main staircase. While ascending the stairs the visitor is placed in the middle of a scene from Mexican history as the mural stretches over 400 meters. Like a canopy it envelopes the concave ceiling and the perpendicular walls.

An acclaimed social realist, his work acknowledges the peasants and workers as the fountainhead of progress and power and unmasks exploiters from the religious and political hierarchy, all in the looming presence of Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla, the priest who spearheaded the Mexican Revolution.

Orozco’s known as a leading Fresco painter has used the challenging technique extensively. Fresco requires the pigment to be transferred to moist plaster to facilitate fusion. This not only ensures permanence but keeps the colours vibrant. The palette employed in the mural includes all possible tones and tints of black and red creating the effect of an inferno to indicate the violence and bloodshed experienced during independence. The dark recesses highlight perspective and balance the strong architectural elements within the space. Stylistically the mural echoes Constructivism which is associated with the oeuvre of the artist.

Diego Rivera (1886-1957) burst onto the headlines of US newspapers when his mural ‘Man at crossroads’, with its Communist references, won him the displeasure of his client Nelson Rockefeller and was destroyed at the RCA building at the Rockefeller Centre in New York. In his own country, despite a tumultuous relationship with the state and his intellectual peers, he won many accolades.

His large works and a series of smaller murals at the National Palace in Mexico City (1930-33) clearly refer to the Mexican folk palette and the mural conventions of the Mayan heritage. Ancient history and post independence political and social struggles are his persistent theme. At the National Palace besides a monumental work based on the Mexican Revolution that spans two floors, his over a dozen smaller murals on the cultural details of Mexican civilisations are located along the wall between doors in the verandah that skirts the courtyard on the first floor.

The people of Pakistan were introduced to monumental public murals by Sadequain (1930 -1987) whose great ceilings and wall murals are an integral part of the nation’s visual art memory. Throughout his career, Sadequain was deeply impressed by great Urdu poets like Ghalib and Iqbal who addressed the social issues of their time and shares the universal message of human freedom with his Mexican counterparts. These ideals motivated Sadequain to create murals in the public space from hospitals to airports, offices to museums and banks.

His murals (circa 1960s) in the Turbine room of the Turbela Dam eulogise the blue collar worker at a time when the industrial revolution was being heralded in Pakistan and the anticipation of the fruits of its harvest was still a romantic notion.

Sadequain completed the ceiling at Lahore Museum in 1973 and work was begun in 1986 on the ceiling at the Frere Hall in Karachi. Later it was renamed the Gallerie Sadequain. Both ceilings reference Iqbal’s message of khudi or ‘self’ as an agency of change.

The mammoth painted ceiling of the Central Gallery at the Lahore Museum takes its inspiration from Iqbal’s verse Sitaroon say agay jehan aur bhi hein, abhi ishq kay imtihan aur bhi hein (there are many worlds beyond the stars …and many challenges yet to be met), the artist puts Adam and Eve on the centre stage and challenges them to harness the untapped energy of the universe. Curled in a cocoon like embryos the male and female figures seem to anticipate the moment of awakening. The panorama that surrounds them is a tightly knit constellation of stars and planets in motion. The large discs are depicted as a kinetic mass with halos that open up in a spiral of waves. This timeless process of destruction and construction in the skies, with large meteors spewing debris in their wake to herald the birth of new planets is shown against the dense black space of infinite galaxies. This allegorical references point both to the vast resources available to man and the constraints of time put on him to complete the mandate.

The painted ceiling at Frere Hall in Karachi with its emblematic imagery expands both the pictorial and conceptual canvas. The ceiling titled ‘Al ard o was samawat’ (earth and the heavens) embrace the history of mankind and the geography of the planet. Maps of the world are depicted in several panels and long emaciated fingers holding a quill pen a reoccurring motif in Sadequain’s oeuvre, dominates the mural.

Both the size and their position in the mural of the calligraphed words ilm (knowledge) and amal (action) indicate their importance to the content. All four corners are densely populated with battalions of figures armed with tools of knowledge and progress like pens, tools of mathematicians and scientists, farming implements , even a lance with a banner of peace in Urdu and English. Mythological characters are shown as emblems of light and darkness on one side and war and peace on the other side.

Unlike most of Sadequain’s paintings and drawings which are full of angst, melancholy subjects and negation of his personal self in the tradition of the ‘fakir’ show man at his most decadent and hypocritical, his murals always reflect optimism.

Sadequain preferred to paint on wooden panels which were fixed as false ceiling, this makes his work more vulnerable and a trained restorer’ audit is long overdue. The works in the Turbine room at the Tarbela Dam may be specially threatened due to their exposure to extreme temperatures for a long period and may need re-location. The National Gallery of Art in Islamabad can come to the rescue and accommodate large works. With timely intervention, the Ministry of Culture can save a priceless work of Sadequain, the greatest muralist Pakistan has known.