Why Pakistani modern art and why Tasaduq Sohail?

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Tasaduq Sohail: The Rebel at the Heart of The Noble Sage

If you've visited The Noble Sage, you'll have met Tasaduq Sohail, even if you didn't know his name. His paintings and drawings make up the biggest single part of our collection, and we hold the largest collection of his work outside Pakistan. Collectors all over the world have bought his work through us.

The story of how the work came to us is a lovely one. When Sohail returned to Pakistan, he left much of his work with two women who had been his girlfriends during his London years. Both of them later came to the gallery with the paintings and drawings he had left them, and those works form the bulk of our collection today. It also means that every work comes with a direct line back to the artist himself. Sohail has a special place here for another reason too: he was a north London artist, who lived and worked just minutes from where his paintings now hang.

His road to becoming an artist was a remarkable one. Sohail was born in Jalandhar in 1930, and he was a teenager when Partition tore the Punjab apart in 1947. His family was one of the many hundreds that fled for Lahore in buses and trains. The images of people being murdered never left him. It convinced him that the human capacity for cruelty was limitless and that religion lay at the root of it.

In Karachi he first made his name not as a painter but as a writer. He studied at Islamia College under the great critic Muhammad Hasan Askari, wrote Urdu short stories and published a collection, Tanhai Ka Safar (The Journey of Loneliness).

In the early 1960s he left for London. He had no art training at all. He worked in a factory in Ealing, then at a newsagent's at Golders Green station, and later drove buses. Every day his route took him past St Martin's School of Art on Charing Cross Road, where he watched the students and wondered what went on inside. Eventually he went in and joined a life-drawing class. This unusual decision started his career in art as he was told by the teacher that he had a natural gift. He went every week for six months, and he later called those classes "probably the most valuable days in my life as an artist."

Before the galleries came calling, he sold his paintings on the pavement outside Hyde Park. He wryly noticed that the worse a painting was, the more likely it was to sell, and that adding a nude worked wonders. By his own colourful account he saved his shillings for the strip joints of Soho, though his old friend Tariq Ali suspected he enjoyed boasting about them more than visiting them. Some of the women who sat for him were sex workers who told him their stories, and he painted their lives with real anger at what they had to endure.

All of this went into the work. Sohail's paintings are provocative and yet deeply sensitive, full of mysterious narratives and poetic meanings that you can puzzle over for years. The storyteller in him never left. His pictures are peopled with birds, dogs, horses, mermaids, mullahs and wide-eyed women in strange, dreamlike landscapes that owe something to Persian poetry and something to the Surrealists.

Running through it all is a fierce anger at men: at their religions, their wars and their sexual deviancy, which leave women and animals as the victims of their destruction. Animals were his great love, and he thought them more refined in many ways than people. Yet he is never simply grim. Sohail had a wonderfully bawdy sense of humour, and his satire can make you laugh out loud even as it stings.

What really sets him apart is how different he was from his Pakistani contemporaries. Sadequain, born the same year as Sohail, and Gulgee became the great public names of Pakistani modernism. Both were celebrated for monumental works and, above all, for calligraphy, the art of the sacred word. Both enjoyed official patronage, with Sadequain painting murals for public buildings and Gulgee painting portraits of heads of state. Calligraphy also suited the times: under General Zia in the 1980s, the state favoured Islamic and abstract art, and figurative painting, let alone the nude, became a risky business at home.

The closest comparison is perhaps Ahmed Parvez, who also tried his luck in London, arriving in 1955 and showing at the New Vision Centre and elsewhere. Parvez found his voice in abstraction, in bursts of prismatic colour and restless line. After nine years he went home, and he later received Pakistan's Pride of Performance award. Sohail took a different road from all of them. He stayed in London for some forty years, beyond the reach of censors and patrons, and he never gave up the figure or the story.

He painted exactly what he wanted: naked bodies, hypocritical clerics and the violence done in the name of faith. Where Gulgee and Sadequain glorified the word and Parvez turned to pure colour, Sohail questioned the men who preached and the world they had made. He was uncompromising and well ahead of his time, painting about sex, faith and power with a frankness that was rare anywhere, let alone for an émigré artist in London from the 1960s onwards. That fearless independence is what makes his work feel so fresh today. His work is now held by the Victoria and Albert Museum, the Arts Council, Tate and the National Museum of Pakistan, where a gallery in his name opened in 2018. We are proud to have placed works with Tate and with Burgh House & Hampstead Museum.

Best of all, Sohail is easy to collect. Works in our collection range from around £450 to £15,000, from intimate drawings to major oils, so there really is something for everyone. Anyone can own a work by a modern Pakistani master. If you'd like to see more of his work, or simply have a chat about where to begin, please do get in touch with us at The Noble Sage. We'd love to introduce you to him.