editorial

When Georgio Vassari was compiling the lives of the most eminent painters, sculptors and architects for his compendious book that came out in 1550, the criteria he applied for his selection were eminence, mastery and influence. Most of the artists celebrated in this book no doubt possessed these qualities, but, as it happened, they also passed the more difficult test of time. Many of them, in later times, would become inspiring figures for young artists working in diverse media. These are artists we call masters–artists with exceptional creative talent and consummate skill, as well as the ability to animate artistic landscapes spanning different cultures and times.

This issue of Jamini takes a close look at a few of the contemporary masters from South Asia and beyond, and evaluates their contribution. The articles, specially commissioned for the issue, attempt to read these masters in relation to the history, culture and society of their respective countries, locate them against the modernist ethos and, in the process, establish their uniqueness as artists.

The three masters from Bangladesh, Quamrul Hassan, Safiuddin Ahmed and Mohammad Kibria, besides being painters (and in the case of the latter two) printmakers of excellence, had also been involved in an art movement that, more than fifty years ago, inaugurated the modernist phase in Bangladeshi art. Quamrul, a painter of exceptional ability and enigmatic simplicity, was also a cultural activist, and Syed Manzoorul Islam takes a look at his chequered life and work to find out how his art and his politics came to supplement each other. Fakrul Alam examines the elegant and eloquent paintings and prints of Safiuddin which put him in a class of his own, appreciated mostly by connoisseurs. Kaiser Haq writes on the different phases of the development of Kibria as an artist and shows how and why his angst-filled canvas in the last few years warmed up to life. On a similar vein, Ellat Datta tries to find out how Ganesh Pyne, who seems to be particularly attracted to urban decrepitude, negotiates his way between such reality and childhood fantasy and memory. Shakti Bhatt examines the painterly resemblances and differences between the husband-wife team of contemporary Indian masters, Manu and Madhavi Parekh.

From Pakistan, Salwat Ali, in an insightful article on Zubeida Agha, attempts to evaluate her as a painter of ideas whose intellectual probing of the mental landscape accounted for her uniqueness as an artist. Mian Ijaz ul Hasan writes on Shakir Ali, the pre-eminent Pakistani painter, whose forms grew in complexity as he gained confidence, but who settled, in the end, on the pastoral as a way of compensating for the lost Eden. Hasan also pleads for the need of a new critical vocabulary free from Eurocentric signification in writing about artists from the ‘third world countries’. Anoli Perera looks at the works of the contemporary Sri Lankan master H.A. Karunaratne whose abstract expressionism and experimentations with materials and ideas have placed him in an exalted position in Sri Lankan art. The Egyptian artist Adel El-Siwi too seems to have gone a long way, as Wejdan Almannai informs us in her piece on the artist. Once a practitioner of ‘pure’ painting, El-Siwi now creates installation art works that are, nevertheless, reinforced by paint.

From Korea, MeeAe Lee writes about contemporary Korean masters, showing how their formalist modernism has been influenced by Korean monochrome painting and minimalist art. And finally, from Edinburgh, Angus Calder introduces us to the Scottish-Italian sculptor and graphic artist Eduardo Paolozzi who is giving a new interpretation of the violent and superficial culture of the west through sculptures that look like strange humanoid robots.

This issue of Jamini has its usual features–book and exhibition reviews and art notes. The one exhibition that deserves special mention is this year’s national exhibition of paintings and sculptural work. Ziaul Karim takes a hard look at the recently concluded exhibition, giving praise where praise is due, but taking exception to some shoddy pieces that got selected through a flawed selection process. All in all, we hope readers will find this issue of Jamini as varied as the colours of a typical Bangladeshi grishma (Summer).

When Georgio Vassari was compiling the lives of the most eminent painters, sculptors and architects for his compendious book that came out in 1550, the criteria he applied for his selection were eminence, mastery and influence. Most of the artists celebrated in this book no doubt possessed these qualities, but, as it happened, they also…