Modern art in Bengal had always maintained a continuous dialogue with tradition while accommodating western trends and interpretations. The works of the early exponents of modernism are informed with a sensibility that respected tradition while promoting innovation. In that sense modern art in Bangladesh has never severed its bonds with tradition–even when abstraction became the preferred expressive mode with some painters in the 1960s–as the artists' outlook on life, their use of materials, their strong commitment to society, culture and politics of their time provided the frame of reference for their art.
Political and social developments of the 1940s inclined artists towards realism and real life studies. When Zainul Abedin presented his album of famine sketches in 1943, it signalled the triumph of realism. It also showed that an artist's commitment to life could help him create significant forms. Zainul's search for a meaning of life led him to further explorations of the Bengalee psyche, and he entered the rich world of folk forms and folk imagination and aesthetics. Quamrul Hassan, Safiuddin Ahmed, Anwarul Huq and others who had migrated to Dhaka from Calcutta after the partition of India in 1947, joined him in this journey. Zainul and his colleagues set up an Art Institute in Dhaka in 1948, which gave a huge boost to their efforts to initiate a modern art movement in Bangladesh. Indeed, the setting up of the Art College inaugurated the most formative chapter in our art history.
Throughout the nineteen fifties and sixties, there were frenzied activities in the art scene. Leading artists had gone to Europe for further training and had come back. They initiated a cult of modernism that expropriated most of the western techniques, including cubism and abstract expressionism. Geometric configuration was dominant, colour became a means of exploration of hidden meanings, and space became a thing to invest with structures of feeling. Experimentation, in other words, was a distinguishing preoccupation of these artists.
But even when abstraction held the sway, the presence of folk forms and folk imagination was unmistakable. S M Sultan and Quamrul Hassan were obvious exponents of the genre that sought interpretative strength in folk forms, but there were others who combined a sharply western sensibility with the timeless folk imagination.
The second generation of artists, who had taken keen interest in the modern art movement in the western world, indulged more in the individualistic abstract expressionism than follow any particular school or style. With the emergence of Hamidur Rahman, Aminul Islam, Mohammad Kibria, Murtaja Baseer, Rashid Chowdhury and Abdur Razzaque who received training in Europe and America in advanced technique and media, a revolutionary change was noticed in the form and style of art in the 1960s.
The war of independence and the eventual emergence of Bangladesh as a sovereign country in 1971 had a tremendous impact on our creative imagination. For a time images of the cataclysmic events had an overpowering presence in our art, but gradually these were placed at a more symbolic and metaphorical level, where they helped shape a new sensibility. The reappearance of semi-abstract and half-figurative works in the seventies was one outcome of that accommodation.
Many of those who were active in the seventies had actually started earlier, in the early or late sixties. Their work strove to achieve a distinctive expression and style that reflected their enthusiasm. Those who worked in abstraction were trying to accommodate the divisive nature of time and reality within the frame of familiar experiences. Folk forms, half-figurative or figurative style became attractive for those who tried to balance their innate lyricism with demands of reality. The art of the time saw wide diversity of mediums used. Graphic art received a new impetus and sculptural art became a field to explore. Among important artists of the time were Qayyum Chowdhury, Nitun Kundu, Abu Taher, Samarjit Roy Chowdhury, Hashem Khan, Rafiqun Nabi, Monirul Islam, Mahmudul Haque, Abdus Shakoor, Chandra Shekhar Dey, Hashi Chakraborty, Monsur Ul Karim, Hamiduzzaman Khan, Kazi Ghiyasuddin, Biren Shome, K M A Qayyum, Shahabuddin, Nazlee Laila Mansur and Alak Roy.
The seventies and eighties were a time of expansion of art institutes, art galleries, and an increase of exhibitions. Art sales also picked up. Our contact with international art communities grew. Dhaka hosted the first Asian Art Biennale in 1981, and, despite political and other problems, the event has been held regularly, with participation even from some African and Pacific Rim countries. There were also bilateral exchanges of exhibitions with other countries, which resulted in artistic formations that could appeal to wider audiences elsewhere. The cultivation of a postmodern sensibility in the eighties was somehow related to that imaginative expansion. The term postmodern should not create any misunderstanding here; for, in the spirit of playfulness that many artists employed at the time, in going against seriousness and valorising levity and the sense of the absurd, the artists were truly interpreting our life and experience with a new insight. They no longer felt inhibited in giving due importance to the grotesque, the ludicrous and the absurd, and defying conventions of serious interpretations. Among the artists whose works deserve special mention are Farida Zaman, Ranjit Das, Mohammad Eunus, Rokeya Sultana, Nasreen Begum, Kazi Rakib, Tarun Ghosh, Naima Haque, G S Kabir, Dhali Al Mamun, Dilara Begum Jolly, Khalid Mahmud Mithu, Sheikh Afzal, Kanak Chanpa Chakma, Shishir Bhattacharjee, Wakilur Rahman, Niloofar Chaman, Mahbubur Rahman and Mohammad Iqbal.
Once, in the sixties, the leading tendency was towards abstraction. Today, semi-abstraction (figures for personalised expression) and figurative work (figures for whatever potentials they symbolise, in whatever innovative ways that offer themselves) are the principal norms, although abstraction is still very much pursued. The use of colour has a striking range and depth, the exploitation of the potentials of different media is exhaustive, and the artists' understanding of their means and their medium is often of a very high level. What all this means is that, contemporary art in Bangladesh has developed to an extent that it can claim its own niche in the world of art.
For the artists of the eighties the time was one of both loss and gain. They lost the earlier exuberance and sense of confidence in the destiny of a new nation, but they gained a deeper insight into their time, history and reality. What they lost in terms of passion, they gained in terms of intellectuality. The artists of the seventies also felt passionately about the liberation of our country, about its new­found identity and its prospects, but the events of the mid-decade disillusioned them. Their younger contemporaries inherited that disillusionment, but struggled to come out of it. They too, went to tradition, to rural Bangladesh and to myths and legends. But their search went deeper than the surface images, motifs and impressions. Their intellectual probing enabled them to understand the historical inevitabilities that shaped our life. They learnt to take them in stride, arming them with the wisdom of the common people. Some pursued a style that blended elements of satire, social commentary, myth and a personal interpretation of time and history, that was apparently a reflection of a rising postmodernist attitude to art in the eighties everywhere. There are indeed enough postmodernist elements in their works to describe them as such; but their satire, self-reflexivity, incongruities, caricature and fun are ultimately a contribution of our traditional art and creative practices.
What the artists pursuing a somewhat postmodernist style found in our folk traditions were not a series of surface images/motifs only, but the capacity to laugh and make fun of even the most inexorable social and political situation. This is also true of the art of the present, more or less.

S. Manzoorul Islam
2008