ZAINUL
ABEDIN
(1914-1976)
Zainul Abedin, (1914-1976) an artist of exceptional talent
and international repute. He played a pioneering role in the modern art
movement in Bangladesh that began, by all accounts, with the setting up of the
Government Institute of Arts and Crafts in 1948 in Dhaka of which he was the
founding principal.
Zainul
Abedin at work
He
was well known for his leadership qualities in organising artists and art
activities in a place that had practically no recent history of institutional
or professional art. It was through the efforts of Zainul Abedin and a few of
his colleagues that a tradition of Modern Art took shape in Bangladesh just
within a decade. For his artistic and visionary qualities the title of
Shilpacharya has been bestowed on him.
Born
in Mymensingh in 1914, Zainul grew up amidst a placid surrounding dominated by
the river Brahmaputra. The river and the open nature inspired him from his
early life. He got himself admitted in Calcutta Government Art School in 1933
and learnt for five years the British/European academic style that the school
diligently followed. In 1938, he joined the faculty of the Art School, and
continued to paint in his laid-back, romantic style.
'Famine
1943', sketch by Zainul Abedin
A
series of water colours that Zainul did as his tribute to the river Brahmaputra
earned him the Governor’s Gold Medal in an all-India exhibition in 1938. It was
a recognition that brought him into the limelight, and gave him the confidence
to forge a style of his own.
Zainul's
dissatisfaction with the Orientalist style that seemed to him heavily mannered
and static, and the limitations of European academic style led him towards
realism. His fascination with line remained however, and he made versatile use
of it in his interpretation of the everyday life of the people.
In
1943, he drew a series of sketches on the man-made famine that had spread
throughout Bengal, killing hundreds of thousands of people. Done in Chinese ink
and brush on cheap packing paper, the series, known, as Famine Sketches were
haunting images of cruelty and depravity of the merchants of death, and the
utter helplessness of the victims.
The
sketches brought Zainul all-India fame, but more than that they helped him find
his rhythm in a realistic mode that fore grounded human suffering, struggle and
protest. The Rebel Crow (water colour, 1951) marks a high point of that style.
This particular brand of realism that combined social inquiry and protest with
higher aesthetics was to prove useful to him in different moments of history
such as 1969 and 1971 when Zainul executed a few of his masterpieces.
In
1947, after the partition of the subcontinent, Zainul came to settle in Dhaka,
the capital of the eastern province of Pakistan. Dhaka had no art institute or
any artistic activity worth mentioning. Zainul Abedin, with the help of his
colleagues, many of whom had also migrated to Dhaka from Calcutta, founded the
art Institute. In 1951, he went to Slade School of Art in London for a two-year
training. Zainul's works after his return from London showed the beginning of a
new style a 'Bengali' style, so to say where folk forms with their geometric,
sometimes semi-abstract representations, the use of primary colours and a lack
of perspective were prominent features. Two Women (gouache 1953), Painna's
Mother (gouache 1953) and Woman (water colour 1953) are some of the notable
works of this period.
'Harvest',
watercolor by Zainul Abedin, 1934
Zainul
Abedin’s works throughout the fifties and sixties reflected his preference for
realism, his aesthetic discipline, his predilection for folk forms and primary
colours. Increasingly, however, he came to realise the limitations of folk art
its lack of dimensionality, its flat surface, an absence of the intricate
relationship between light and shade, and their lack of dynamism. As a way of
transcending these limitations, Zainul went back to nature, to rural life, and
the daily struggles of man, and to a combination of styles that would be
realistic in essence, but modernist in appearance.
Zainul’s
idea of modernism was not confined to merely abstracted, non-representational
styles, but to a deeper understanding of the term ‘modernity’ itself in which
social progress and individual dynamism are two leading components.
Thus
the powerful figure of men and women struggling against man-made and natural
calamities are a reminder of that essential idea of modernism: realising the
limits of the individual. Zainul's works centralise men and women who labour
and struggle against odds, and realise their potentials.
The
65 feet scroll painting (in Chinese ink, water colour and wax) Nabanna that he
drew in celebration of the 1969 mass movement or the 30 feet scroll painting
Manpura done to commemorate the hundreds of thousands who died in the
devastating cyclone of 1970 show his dynamic style at work. Zainul, of course,
painted nature and the human scene (including the private moments of village
women), but his predilections for speed, movement and an interactive space are
evident in the paintings of late sixties and seventies.
'Sangram'
(Struggle), oil paint by Zainul Abedin, 1976
In
1975, Zainul Abedin set up a folk museum at sonargaon, and a gallery in Mymensingh (shilpacharya zainul
abedin museum) to house some of his works. He
became actively involved in a movement to preserve the heritage of Bengal, and
reorient Bengal art to the roots of Bengali culture, as he felt the futility of
unimaginative copying of western techniques and styles that modern art somehow
inspired in a section of the local artists. His health began to deteriorate
however, as he developed lung cancer. He died on 28 May 1976 in Dhaka.
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![[Shahabuddin Ahmed]](file:///C:/Users/ABSIDD~1/AppData/Local/Temp/msohtmlclip1/01/clip_image001.jpg)
Novera
Ahmed, a highly talented, audacious and somewhat enigmatic pioneer sculptor of
Bangladesh who is credited with the original design of the Shaheed Minar, a
historical memorial monument for the martyrs of the language movement of 1952. 
