Zainul Abedin Born: December 29, 1914,Kishoreganj, East Bengal, British Raj (now Bangladesh) Died: May 28,

1976 (aged 61)

Nationality: Bangladeshi Field: Painting Zainul Abedin an artist of exceptional talent and international repute. He played a pioneering
role in the modern art movement in Bangladesh that began, by all accounts, with the setting up of the Government Institute of Arts
and Crafts (now Institute of Fine Arts) in 1948 in Dhaka of which he was the founding principal. He was well known for his leadership
qualities in organizing artists and art activities in a place that had practically no recent history of institutional or professional art. It
was through the efforts of Zainul Abedin and a few of his colleagues that a tradition of MODERN ART took shape in Bangladesh just
within a decade. For his artistic and visionary qualities the title of Shilpacharya has been bestowed on him

Zainul Abedin was a very famous artist in Bangladesh. He is widely known to all for his sketches on the great famine
of 1940 and other paintings on our village people, their lives and their way of living. He tried to express his feelings
for those who suffered much during the famine. He depicted these extremely shocking pictures with human
compassion. He used to make his own ink by burning charcoal and using cheap ordinary packing paper for sketching.
He produced a series of brush and ink drawings, which later became iconic images of human sufferings

Born in Mymensingh in 1914, Zainul grew up amidst a placid surrounding dominated by the river Brahmaputra. The river and the
open nature inspired him from his early life. He got himself admitted in Calcutta Government Art School in 1933 and learnt for five
years the British/European academic style that the school diligently followed. He was the first Muslim student to obtain first class
distinction from the school. In 1938, he joined the faculty of the Art School, and continued to paint in his laid-back, romantic style.