BOOK REVIEW:"The quest of Zainul Abedin" by Burhanuddin Khan Jahangir

০৮ ই মে, ২০০৯ বিকাল ৩:৫৫

BOOK REVIEW:

"The quest of Zainul Abedin"

by

Burhanuddin Khan Jahangir





1.0 INTRODUCTION

Zainul Abedin (1914-1976) was an artist from Bangladesh. Like many of his contemporaries, he was born in undivided India, and lived through the creation of Pakistan and finally the emergence of independent Bangladesh. Abedin's paintings on the Bengal famine of 1940s is probably his most characteristic work. In Bangladesh, he is often referred to as Shilpacharya (Great Teacher of the Arts).

Dr. Burhanuddin Khan Jahangir, Art Critic and Social Scientist describes Social problems in the art of Zainul Abedin.

his findings have been clearly explained in his account of the social and political milieu when contemporary art actually evolved in Bangladesh.







1.1 BOOK OVERVIEW



The quest of Zainul Abedin

by Burhanuddin Khan Jahangir

Published in 1993, International Centre for Bengal Studies,

Distributor, University Press (Dhaka, Bangladesh)

Contributions: International Centre for Bengali Studies.

By statement: Burhanuddin Khan Jahangir ;

translated from Bengali by Meghna Guhathakurta.

Language: English

Pagination: 77 p. :

Number Of Pages: 64

Subject: Abedin, Zainul - Criticism and interpretation.

Social problems in art.

Notes: Includes bibliographical references.

Social problems in the art of Zainul Abedin, Bangladeshi painter.





1.2 SUMMARY





Zainul Abedin had made an all-India reputation with his drawings and sketches of the 1943 famine, now known as the Famine Sketches, which, in a minimum of details and in bold brush strokes, brought out the un-integrated suffering of the people and the bestiality of human greed. Zainul of course produced many other remarkable works, such as large scroll pictures depicting the devastation of cyclones or the life of ordinary people.



Contemporary art of Bangladesh has its origins during the troubled times of partition of the Indian sub-continent in the year 1947. It was during this time that Zainul Abedin along with a few colleagues decided to move to East Bengal in the quest to set up the very first art learning centers of its kind. They successfully established a school of art with Zainul Abedin heading it as the Principal. Zainul Abedin had become known in the world of art because of his sketches of the Bengal famine that occurred in 1943.



The institute nurtured the talents of an entire generation of contemporary artists, mainly their works of art reflected the changing times. This generation of artists strived to depict the realities of society in their creations.



Social compulsion could well be the reason why Abedin changed over to an abstract form of art. The art school of Zainul Abedin disapproved human figurative representation as this was supposed to have contradicted religious rules and sentiments.





Zainul Abedin's works throughout the fifties and sixties reflected his preference for realism, his aesthetic discipline, his predilection for folk forms and primary colors. Increasingly, however, he came to realize 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.



1.3 IMPORTANCE

Painting as an independent art form is a relatively recent phenomenon in Bangladesh. The main figure behind the art movement was Zainul Abedin. After the partition of Pakistan from India in 1947, he was able to gather around him a school of artists who experimented with various forms, both orthodox and innovative. To discover this legend is the full time job for an art critics. Burhanuddin Khan Jahangir did so.





1.4 CRITICISM

The main objectives of Art Critics:

• to promote the critical disciplines in the field of visual arts

• to ensure their having sound methodological and ethical bases

• to protect the ethical and professional interests of art critics by defending the rights of all members equally

• to facilitate and improve information and international exchanges in the field of visual arts

• to contribute to the reciprocal knowledge and closer understanding of differing cultures

Dr.Jahangir touched all of them. Specifically, promoting critical disciplines, methodological and ethical bases, professional interests earned a closer functionality in the book.







2.0 CONTENT: THE QUEST

As we said earlier the writer tried to describe social problems in the art of Zainul Abedin.



2.1 THE ARCHETECTURE OF ABEDIN’S ART CONCEPTION:



Let us go through the architecture of Abedin’s are conception cross checked with this life, career, time and locality. Spontaneous bohemianism, urban gentlemen like dandyism is not supported by him. Those all are urban complex and crisis. Abedin is the man from rural East Bengle. Life to him is not enjoying milk and honey. To him, life is a struggle; he has to work with it. Abedin was very mush structured, academic and methodological; there is no chance of experiment with art. Every thing is measured with a tea spoon. His base point is rural Bengle and he is unable to over come it.



Zainul academically taught in Calcutta Art School, gained the European thoughts and produced the echo of his own soul. He intercepted the both and became a third thing.



The Bengal School of Art was an influential style of art that flourished in India during the British Raj in the early 20th century. It was associated with Indian nationalism, but was also promoted and supported by many British arts administrators.

The Bengal school arose as an epoch making and nationalist movement reacting against the academic art styles previously promoted in India, both by Indian artists and in British art schools. Following the widespread influence of Indian spiritual ideas in the West, they attempted to reform the teaching methods at the Calcutta School of Art by encouraging students to imitate Mughal miniatures. This caused immense controversy, leading to a strike by students and complaints from the local press, including from nationalists who considered it to be a retrogressive move. The Bengal school's influence in India declined with the spread of modernist ideas in the 1920s.



Calcutta School of Art was not colonial enough as per the author said, rather nationalist it was looking for local national tradition and heritage, it wants to construct the very own and distinct from European are idealism. Zainul himself acquired European form in his art vision. But the soul material of his content is the rural savage primitive decrepit social life of east bengle ever since the beginning.



He did not worked out with abstract form generally. He is a villager with an enlightened soul but still he is a villager in his core. He always remains a villager with a modern vision and realistic judgments. Abedin’s root is social realism. Realism in the visual arts and literature is the depiction of subjects as they appear in everyday life, without embellishment or interpretation. The term also describes works of art which, in revealing a truth, may emphasize the ugly or sordid. Abedin got a journalist like vision with a creative mind and skill. Those properties are required to portraying the reality and corruption along with the emotion and immobility.



Abedin lost his inspirations with his ages. This is because he lost his passion of social analysis, which is his basic and unique art idealism. This method discrete him from his contemporary companions of Calcutta art school. The political changes from to Bangladesh did not created any noticeable change to the socio-economic structure of rural bengle. Parallel to that Abedin was some what unconscious about new born Bengali nationalism in Pakistan regime. So he has nothing to create new. His early creations are enough to describe the society of his old ages. That’s why he is repeating himself.







2.2 FORM & CONTENT



2.2A FORM, METHOD AND TECHNIQUES:

The writer tries to discover multiple dimension of Abedin’s form, method of art conception crosschecked with his personality and academic schooling. There are too many impressionist symptoms on his work. He never used to do a drawing before paint. He used to work with light, not with the space created by object. He used to work with complimentary colors and water colors. He let the colors drop or flow spontaneously so that complimentary colors mix with each other and create the impression. Characteristics of Impressionist paintings include visible brush strokes, open composition, emphasis on light in its changing qualities (often accentuating the effects of the passage of time), and ordinary subject matter, the inclusion of movement as a crucial element of human perception and experience, and unusual visual angles.



Abedin just created structure and images and let the viewer free to mix the color with their eyes so that he can construct the object with their mind according to his past experiences. Sense of perspective is very important to create impressionist landscape. His distinctions to the impressionism are he did not use enough broken brush strokes.





2.2B CONTENT, VALUES AND PHYLOSOPHY

Art of Abedin is not about hollow intellectual exercise. It is about hearty faculty, a craft of magnanimous man. Two basic inspirations dominated Abedin to create masterpieces.

First, beauty of nature working out with light and shadow, color and transparency of rural bengle. Which we can call his pacific and calm content.

Second, humanitarian excitation and restlessness during a social or national crisis, the regular fate of bengle. Which we can describe his famous aggressively compassionate type of content.

Another type the writer did not mentioned which we can name “struggle of life” type of paintings.

A quick impression guided Abedin to draw or paint. He never had a big, defined, organized working plan. A figure or structure inspired him, he started to draw it. After drawing, he is unable to create the sphere or situate the space around the object in his paintings due to the limitation of his working platform. But his drawings did not lack these limitations. He draws what he wants to draw and skips all other details and environment rudely. So his drawings are more finished, sufficient, confident and matured.

Again spontaneous ness of structure is the basic criteria of Abedin’s landscape. He looked at the nature as a man grown up in nature. Not like a n urban fop who does not know nature and wants to enjoy it. We can find nature is submerged with life and life is submerged with nature in his landscape, especially the water color works. But the figures are always bold, static and dramatic.

Abedin’s paintings are expressionist only in the sense of core value. Where the viewers became not only interactive but more important than the painting and the painter.

In drawing, Abedin exercised the visual experiences. But the oil paintings should be very detailed; it should have acquired solidity or mobility, texture, concreteness and elaborated master plan. These are the parameter for a painting. A drawing lacs these parameters. For drawing skill, confident stroke of line and tone are only parameter to be the best. Abedin is master of drawing.







2.3 INSIGHT OF INDIVIDUAL IDENTITY INSPITE OF IDIOLOGY:



Zainul Abedin, educated in Calcutta Art School and introduced with European Art, was a rustic person in his very individual identity. The simplicity of a country dweller man of east bengle is the core subject of his soul. Abedin interacted with these three values- consciousness of a modern man, soul of a simple person and spontaneous ness as an artist. He had nothing to do with abstract ideas or tough philosophical vision. His life, his style or his lifestyle is pragmatic, practical and realistic. Thus he insisted to his viewer in front of reality along with its beauty or cruelty. He placed the viewer all the real life characters of a country side- the peasant, the bullock, the boatman, the fisherman, the village woman, children. Each of these declares their existence in a bold manner. And the viewers also notice, these characters are not imposed into space, rather part of the space. Characters and the surrounding nature acquire a unique harmony. There are harmony between peasant and the village road, bullock and the plough, the fishermen and his net. All represents a simple interconnection, mutual harmony, and above all the social consciousness of the painter. Abedin wants to represent social reality, he wants us to see daily life struggle of a simple country man , the hard labor to live, outrage and way back to overcome, the joyous leisure after day long hard work, simple luxury, softness and beauty of life, and again above all reality of these starving people.

Thus the powerful figure of men and women struggling against man-made and natural calamities are a reminder of that essential idea of modernism: realizing the limits of the individual. Zainul's works centralize men and women who labor and struggle against odds, and realize their potentials. The 65 feet scroll painting (in Chinese ink, watercolor 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.







2.4 THE THREE FRONTEERS:

Due to the structure of mind expressed earlier and the typification of form and content, the excellence of Abedin also could be stated by his warfare against three powerful unchallenged institutions, respectively , Calcutta Art School, the middle class fop society and Bangalee Muslim society. First he denied to acquire, to seek art heritage from classic India. His heritage lies in beautiful struggling country life of bengle ever since the beginning. He also denied the method by Mukul Bose, Abon Thakur, Nandalal et cetra. He found his techniques in Europe.

Second frontier , he was and is not the painter for storm in a coffee pot Bangalee middle class dandy people. All his paintings blow the smell of the wet soil of bengle. Brick, iron carpeted road, avenue and gardens are not available in his works. He is not a fake and he denied to wear a mask of gentleman.

And thirdly, the secular vision of Abedin constructed a distance between his beloved east bengle and pious-radical society of east bengle. He denied to be religion divided even though he is a bangle Muslim. His third war is against himself.





3.0 END LINES

Abedin’s straight vision helped him to get that orthodoxy, this power also let him survive against the barriers. He deals wit simple people ,small people. His settings are fixed in village or sub town. His social political economical intellectual analysis is the understanding of mass people- which we call real analysis, an analysis grown from the grass root level of society, a bold but practical analysis and vision. Vanity fair, pompousness left off the art of Abedin. This is what makes him a legend – Zainul Abedin

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