Page 304 - Art and Crafts of Bangladesh

FIRST GENERATION ARTIST 301

same sense of social responsibility. It were the political and social
movements of the forties that inspired this sense of responsibility in
them. Even today some art theorists believe that the flow that grew out
of the social movements to be the first modern trend of the forties and
they consider Zainul to have played the most importamt role in forming
that flow. Again, according to the opinion of some, the Famine series
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by Zainul is incomparable even today in the Indian context. Owing to
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the Famine series the position of the young Zainul at thirty years of age
reached a very high point as a contemporary Bengali artist. (In the
album entitled Bengal Painter’s Testimony published under the initiative
of the Students’ Federation to create a relief fund featuring the works of
all the artists of Bengal, only three artists were allotted more than one
page and Zainul was the most important one among the three.) 70
Inspired by this success or perhaps drawn back by this fame, some
idealistic and stylistic aspects of the Famine series turned into
permanent characteristics in Zainul’s works. For example, in the
Famine series or other figure dominated works of a later period the manner in which fig. 8.5 Portrait of Artist
humans have been presented makes it quite easy to presume that like the communist Anwarul Haq, pen and
poet Nazrul, he also believed that ‘There is nothing greater than man, nor anything ink, 1942
more glorious.’ [Trans.] It is because of this belief that though the men and women in
his pictures were representatives of low income, needy, laboring society, they were not
seekers of mercy from any super-natural force and also were not people who had
surrendered in defeat. Everywhere they are in proximity with the higher sphere, as
even when they travel along the road to certain death from starvation, right up to the
last moment they are in the role of people who struggle for survival. It is to be noticed
that, in most cases he presented these working people over the major portion of the
canvas, elongating their forms. As a result, in some cases the figures have become
‘themselves the controllers of their own fate,’ [Trans.] and even that of eternity.
To express this all-conquering aspect in man, he has in many cases looked at the figure
from a nearly ground touching position, alongside elongation. Consequently, the
general figures in spite of becoming very long in proportion, do not lose their worldly
realism (pl. 8.2). In this aspect Zainul’s attitude seems to be very close to the artistic
ideal of the socialist world. (Zainul had begun to get close to the art, literature and
ideal of the socialist world right from the beginning of the forties.) The interrelation
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between man and the landscape or nature in the figure dominated pictures of Zainul is
also very significant. We see the material world presented with the limitlessness of the
universe in the works of some of the romantic artists of the west and also in the works
of Chinese artists. The presence of man in these paintings seems to activate the
limitless quality of the material world. On the other hand, in Zainul’s pictures the
relation between the material world and man has exactly the opposite characteristic;
which means, the material world here plays an auxiliary role to express the vastness