Ben Uri Research Unit

Born: 1914 Kishoreganj, East Bengal, India (now Mymensingh, Bangladesh)

Died: 1976 Dhaka, Bangladesh

Year of Migration to the UK: 1951

Biography

Painter and draughtsman Zainul Abedin was born to a Muslim family in Kishoregonj (now Mymensingh), East Bengal, British India (now Bangladesh) on 29 December 1914. As a child he grew up observing the nearby Brahamaputra River, which appeared frequently in his early drawings. From 1933–38 he attended the Government School of Art in Calcutta (now Kolkata). During his final year of art school he entered the All India Art Exhibition with paintings of the unspoiled rural landscapes of his childhood, for which he eventually won the Governor’s Gold Medal. He returned to the Government School of Art to teach, but eventually settled in Dhaka, East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) after the partition of India in 1948. In the same year he founded the Government Institute of Arts and Crafts (now the Institute of Fine Arts) in Dhaka and was its first Principal. Abedin was well-known by the early 1950s because of his ‘famine sketches’ of the 1943 hunger crisis in Bengal, in which an estimated 2 to 3 million starved to death. His blackened drawings, with pigment obtained by burning charcoal which he had found, conveyed the agony and tragedy of those marginalised under the British occupation of India.

In 1951 Abedin received a Commonwealth Fellowship to study at London’s Slade School of Fine Art under the tutelage of New Zealand-born painter and engraver John Buckland-Wright. During his year of study in London he held two solo exhibitions: one under the auspices of the Royal India, Pakistan and Ceylon Society at the Imperial Institute (which in 1961 became the Commonwealth Institute) and which ran from 3–8 December 1951; and the second, supported by the Pakistan High Commission and held at William Ohly’s Berkeley Galleries in London from 14–26 January 1952. Abedin’s London exhibitions mostly featured his stark pen and ink drawings of the 1943 Bengal famine. Other sketches depicted everyday life in East Pakistan, such as, Homeward Bound, The Floating Market, Boatrace, After Fishing. The shows also included images that would become signature motifs, such as the bull in Retreat. Buckland-Wright noted that Abedin’s ‘best drawings, considered from a purely abstract graphic standpoint, have a life of their own. They are a pattern imbued with the artist’s sensibility. If at the same time they re-create and strongly evoke for us the object that inspired them, they possess, not only a purely aesthetic value, but a forceful emotional power. […] It was these two qualities that struck me forcibly in seeing Mr. Abedin’s brush drawings of the famine scenes in India. The emotional impact of the starving figures is immense, and yet apart from this emotional quality what remains is an abstract aesthetic composition of a very high quality’ (Hoeck and Sunderason, Journey Through Modernism). An article by The Studio magazine's art critic Eric Newton, published in 1952, noted that during his stay in the UK Abedin also studied pottery and textile design, while at the same time, he collected ideas ‘for the development of the Dacca [sic] Institute of Arts’ (The Studio 1952, p. 15). In December 1952 Abedin represented Pakistan at the UNESCO International Conference of Artists in Venice.

After leaving the UK, an exhibition of his work in Lahore, Pakistan in 1953 became the starting point for a number of exhibitions aimed at promoting contemporary Pakistani art. In 1956–7 Abedin travelled to Japan, the USA, Canada, Mexico, and Europe on a Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship, which culminated in a retrospective exhibition held at the Smithsonian Museum in Washington, DC, in 1957. In 1960 Abedin visited the Soviet Union. Abedin subsequently returned to Dhaka but continued to travel across South East Asia making paintings and drawings of marginalised groups. At the invitation of the Arab League, he spent most of 1970 sketching Palestinian guerrilla fighters and refugees in Syria and Jordan. He also painted studies of the Santhal people, an ethnic group native to India and Bangladesh. Abedin supported liberation movements such as the Bengali Language Movement and the Bangladesh Liberation War. He also founded two museums: the Folk Art Musuem Sonargoan in Narayanganj, and a museum of his own works, Zainul Abedin Sangrahshala, in the town of his birth, Mymensingh. In 1974 he was awarded an honorary Doctorate of Letters from the University of Delhi. Zainul Abedin died of lung cancer in Dhaka, Bangladesh on 28 May 1976. He was posthumously awarded the Independence Day Award by the Bangladeshi government, and in 2009 an impact crater discovered on Mercury was named ‘Zabedin’ in tribute to his life and work. Currently there are no public UK institutions holding works by Abedin; his art is represented in the Bangladesh National Museum and Academy of Fine Arts Calcutta, among others.

Related books

Rosa Maria Falvo, Great Masters of Bangladesh - Zainul Abedin (Skira Editore, 2012)
Syed Ali Ahsan, Zainul Abedin: The Man and His Art, exhibition catalogue (Dhaka: Bangladesh National Museum, 2006)
The Art of Zainul Abedin: a Saga of Man and Nature, exhibition catalogue (Dhaka: Bengal Foundation, 2004)
M Islam, Art of Bangladesh Series 1, Zainul Abedin (1977)
B K Jahangir, Contemporary Painters: Bangladesh (Dhaka, 1974)

Public collections

Related organisations

Folk Art Museum Sonargoan, Narayanganj (founder)
Government School of the Arts, Calcutta (Kolkata) (student and teacher) (student and teacher)
Rockerfeller Foundation (fellowship recipient) (fellowship recipient)
Slade School of Fine Art (student) (student)
University of Delhi (honorary Doctorate of Letters) (honorary Doctorate of Letters)
University of Dhaka (teacher) (teacher)
Zainul Abedin Sangrahshala Museum, Mymensingh (founder)

Selected exhibitions

Paintings and sketches by Zainul Abedin, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC (April 1957)
Paintings and Drawings of Zainul Abedin, Berkeley Galleries, London (14-26 January 1952)
Painting and Brush Drawings by Zainul Abedin, Imperial Institute, London (3-8 December 1951)

Ben Uri archive

Consult items in the Ben Uri archive related to [Zainul Abedin]