ART

Bangladeshi Prints Recall Postwar Era

By Arthur Whitman

This fall, the Johnson Museum of Art at Cornell is exhibiting a print portfolio entitled “Line of Ascent” in an exhibition of the same name. Featuring etchings—one each—by twenty veteran Bangladeshi artists, the set dates to 2011, when Studio Shunno, in the capital Dhaka, extended its invitation. e show continues the Johnson’s ongoing commitment to presenting global modernist art at its most engaging. e artists included here, born between the thirties and the sixties, include some of the South Asian nation’s best-known names. (Most are still alive and active today.) While visitors might expect the exotic, all of the work here adopts approaches drawn from European and EuropeanAmerican modernism. Second or third generation Bangladeshi modernists, the artists here have long embraced the challenge of incorporating personal and local content into their imported idiom.

Most of “Line” leans in either of two directions: a surrealist abstraction or humanistic, narrative guration. For those familiar with recent Western art history, both approaches will recall the early postwar era—more so than the postmodern, global “contemporary” art of today.

An aspiration to study and work abroad is a common thread connecting many of these artists. Based largely in Spain since the seventies, Monirul Islam (born 1943) is a noted innovator in intaglio printmaking. Recalling the con ation of the diagrammatic and expressionist found in American artists like Cy Twombly and Eva Hesse, “Cosmic Journey” o ers a rare burst of painterly multicolor.

Naima Haque (born 1953), one of several talented female artists here, contributes the playful “Point of View.” e piece is an overall dark green. A pair of comical wire-frame glasses oat above an abstract landscape of snaking lines, cartographiclooking shapes, and dusty textured tones. Also a poet and children’s book illustrator, Haque appears to be poking generous fun at the high modernist legacy.

Samarjit Roy Chowdhury (born 1937) is one of the oldest artists here. He o ers one of the show’s most striking pieces, “Peacock at prey.” An aquatic dark blue monochrome, the piece presents a Kleelike juxtaposition of so ly geometric, faceted background and outlined, arabesque foreground gure—here a comically aggressive, dragon-like bird.

In contrast to the seemingly universalizing aspirations of the abstractionists, several of the more gurative printmakers here commemorate Bangladesh’s midcentury history of war and famine.

Both “Remembrance,” by Hamiduzzaman Khan (born 1946) and “Smriti Bijoy (Memories of Victory),” by Hashem Khan (born 1941) o er poignant, expressive recollections of Bangladesh’s 1971 war of independence from Pakistan. e former piece is particularly striking, with its two parading, heroic gures in dynamic white lines, against a dark green background.

Taking inspiration from the style of pioneering Bangladeshi modernist Zainul Abedin (1917-1976), Ra qun Nabi (born 1943) presents “Goats.” Against a horizontalstriped background, suggesting the interior of a barn, a mother goat shelters her kid. ick black lines give a cartoonish but disturbing presence to their emaciated bodies.

Kalidas Karmakar (1946-2019) is another legendary gure in Bangladeshi printmaking. Drawing inspiration from his time in Paris with the in uential British printmaker Stanley William Hayter, he is the founder of Cosmos-Atelier 71, a collaborative print studio in Dakha. Allud-

A detail from Kanak Chanpa Chakma’s “Music of Life” (Photo: Provided)

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