Page 57 - Art and Crafts of Bangladesh

54 ART AND CRAFTS

the seventies and representative forms again began to return to painting and sculpture.
An earnest attempt to search for tradition from various sources and links and applying
them in contemporary art started to become noticeable and there was a bid to view art
as not only externally beautiful compositions, but also holding social and political
message and implications in them. What was especially noticeable was the vitality in
the total field of art– a very large number of artists appeared in the art world and
introduced a great variety in the media and method of art. Even senior artists, who
were mostly artists of the abstract style during the previous decade, began returning to
executing paintings in subject based representative style inspired by the Liberation
War and victory. A huge number of young artists and students of art began to receive
opportunities for training in many different countries of the world during this period.
Opportunities for training in Japan, China, India and other oriental countries other
than the western ones started to bring fresh variations in style and method in our art
world. Art education centers were established outside Dhaka in Chittagong, Rajshahi
and Khulna, thus art practice expanded and became richer. Institutional organization
of exhibitions and competitions and state patronage was introduced through the
establishment of Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy. Artists began to be summoned for
the decoration of various buildings and establishments of the new state and the custom
of placing open-air sculptures as memorials of the Liberation War gained currency.
Through the Asian Art Biennale, the opportunity for the artists of our country to
participate in international exhibitions in various countries increased manifold, just as
artists got the opportunity to view directly artworks from other countries for the first
time. Thus, the seventies is naturally a period of revival in the art world of the newly
independent Bangladesh.
The art of our country developed in many diverse directions during the seventies. First
of all, substantial diversity was introduced in the case of media and material. The
practice of sculpture and printmaking was very limited in the previous decade,
whereas in this decade we can observe a huge increase in both. It is from this very
decade that we began to see sculptors in various media. It is also from the seventies
that we find artists who are solely printmakers. However, though realistic subject
based painting made a revival, abstraction still remained as a major style even in this
decade. Other important styles or manners that were introduced can be identified in
the following way– semi-representational form influenced by Cubism, the Surrealist
style and fantasy, modern application of realism, forms of art inspired by tradition and
indigenous art, art derived from other western styles or from the influence of an
individual artist etc. Needless to say, drawing such definitive lines of distinction is
extremely difficult, and even more difficult is to place an artist within a certain style.
The reason is that the same artist has followed different styles at different stages and
such instances are very common.
The most senior and the most celebrated among the talented artists of the seventies is
Monirul Islam (1943-). Although he completed his education in art in the mid sixties,
he bloomed as a creative artist at the beginning of the seventies upon receiving foreign