Zainul Abedin

Zainul Abedin was a Bangladeshi painter, born on 29 December 1914 and died on 28 May 1976 in Dhaka. He was titled Shilpacharya, "Great Teacher of the Arts", was the pioneer of the modern art movement in Bangladesh, and was described by Syed Manzoorul Islam as the founding father of Bangladeshi modern arts. ^{1 2}

He became well known in 1944 through his series of paintings of the Bengal famine of 1943, and in 1948 he helped establish the Institute of Arts and Crafts at the University of Dhaka, now the Faculty of Fine Arts. ¹

He was born at Kendua in Kishoreganj district, Mymensingh, East Bengal. Much of his childhood was spent near the banks of the Brahmaputra river, which later appeared in many of his paintings; a series of watercolours he made as a tribute to the river earned him the Governor's Gold Medal at an all-India exhibition in 1938. ¹

In 1933 he was admitted to the Government School of Art in Calcutta, learned British and European academic styles for five years, and joined the school's faculty after graduating. He was the first Muslim student to obtain a first-class distinction from the school, as the article reports. ¹

After two years of training at the Slade School of Fine Art in London from 1951, he began a new "Bengali style" of folk forms and primary colours, then recognised its limits and returned to nature, rural life and the daily struggles of people, to make art that was realistic but modern in appearance. ¹

After the Partition of the Indian subcontinent he moved to East Pakistan and, with a few colleagues, founded an art institute in Dhaka in 1948, when there were no art institutes in the city. It was soon considered the best art institute in Pakistan in its early years, and he taught at it and was its founding principal. ^{1 2}

He worked for a while in the Pakistani government, and the article names Pakistani and Bangladeshi artists among his students. ¹

His famine sketches of the 1940s are his most remarkable works. Moved by the starving people of the Great Bengal Famine of 1943, he made his own ink by burning charcoal and drew on cheap packing paper the people dying by the roadside; the drawings became iconic images of human suffering and revealed the famine's sinister face through skeletal figures. ¹

His named works include The Struggle, Rebel Cow, Nobanno, Study of a Crow and Two Faces. He visited Palestinian refugee camps in Syria and Jordan in 1970 and made 60–70 paintings of the refugees, and he also painted the 1970 Bhola cyclone that devastated East Pakistan. ¹

He was involved in the Bengali language movement and in the liberation war movement, at the forefront of the cultural movement to re-establish Bengali identity, and in 1969 he painted the scroll Nabanna in Chinese ink, watercolour and wax to celebrate the ongoing non-cooperation movement. ¹

In September 2024 his painting Untitled (1970) sold for US$692,048 at Sotheby's in London, the highest price ever paid for a Bangladeshi artwork at auction as the article reports, and his Santal Couples (1963) sold for US$381,000 at Sotheby's New York in March of the same year. ¹

He received Pakistan's Pride of Performance in 1958 and an honorary Doctor of Letters from the University of Delhi in 1974. In 1975 he founded the Folk Art Museum at Sonargaon and a gallery of his own works in Mymensingh bearing his name. ¹

He was married to Jahanara Abedin and had three sons; this museum publishes no family detail beyond what understanding his work requires. ¹

He developed lung cancer and died on 28 May 1976 in Dhaka. Two Faces was his last painting, completed shortly before his death, and he was buried beside the Dhaka University Central Mosque. ¹

A crater on Mercury was named Abedin after him in 2009, Google celebrated his 105th birthday with a Doodle on 29 December 2019, and a museum in Mymensingh is dedicated to his work. ¹

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