Page 339 - Art and Crafts of Bangladesh

336 ART AND CRAFTS

picture, like the different objects had been in analytical cubism. Similarly he has taken
these informations and has given expression in this picture to a pure composition of
flat colors. Red and Green of 1994, Fish and Net of 1996 too are pure compositions
of flat colors independent of material reality. The Sound of Water, an engraving done
in 1985 perhaps indicates the final stage of his prints (pl. 8.20). He has made an
amazingly diverse application of drawing in it. It depicts life in the water, with
bubbles, whirls, fishes, different insects in it all seems to be busy making noises. From
both the aspects of its subject and form, this print is distinctive. Though the separate
parts of images in this picture appear at first glance to be disconnected to one another,
there is in them a continuity of a spherical-curving rhythm. The unevenness and
surface quality or texture of this print when viewed directly, is uniquely enjoyable.
This effect cannot be reproduced in a printed book.
As an artist Safiuddin is contemporary to the ‘Calcutta Group.’Although the Calcutta
Group made its appearance in 1943 as an organization of young modern artists, quite
a few talented young men of that time remained outside this group. Among them were
Zainul Abedin, Chittaprasad and Safiuddin. Chittaprasad was directly involved with
the communist movement. Safiuddin was associated with the Student’s Federation.
Zainul Abedin was not member of any party or political movement. We can view the
composition of their entire lives by placing them on the ground of space-time and the
context of world art. The two of them belonged nearly to the same period. However,
the main medium of Zainul was painting – though Safiuddin’s main medium was
printmaking, he was equally skilled in oil painting. When Safiuddin made his
appearance in the mid ’40s, Abanindranath Tagore had just put the brush down from
his hand and for the remaining few years of his life playfully made ‘Kutum Katam,’
or assemblages from found objects creating sculpture-like forms. At the beginning of
the ’30s, Abanindranath painted the Arabian Nights series. This series is the last one
in his fine aesthetic romantic style. In 1939 in the background of the Second World
War he took his brush in hand, his fine, soft style was transformed. He started to draw
the pictures of the Krishnamangal series where he painted the killing of seventeen
asuras or demons by the child Krishna. In the context of the Second World War this
painting of the slaughter of asuras was symbolic. Though he lived for ten more years,
from 1941 to 1951 he never painted again. It can almost be said that right after he put
down his brush, the Bengal School reached its end. Meanwhile, the tree of the Bengal
School that Nandalal had planted in Santiniketan, surpassed the Bengal School of
Kolkata due to the richness of the soil.
It is difficult to find signs of inspiration from Abanindranath in Ramkinkar and Binode
Behari Mukherjee’s paintings and even in the paintings of Nandalal himself done in
brushstrokes. At the same time Jamini Prakash Gangooly, Hemendranath Majumdar
and Atul Chandra Bose had built up a tradition of oil paintings depicting the visible
world which centered around the Calcutta Art School. The Government Art School of
Kolkata was the main fortress of that conservatism. Zainul escaped from that fort.