Shahabuddin Ahmed - Sbādhīnatā (Freedom)

Freedom from fear is the freedom
I claim for you my motherland!
Freedom from the burden of the ages, bending your head,
breaking your back, blinding your eyes to the beckoning
call of the future;
Freedom from the shackles of slumber wherewith
you fasten yourself in night's stillness,
mistrusting the star that speaks of truth's adventurous paths;
freedom from the anarchy of destiny
whole sails are weakly yielded to the blind uncertain winds,
and the helm to a hand ever rigid and cold as death.
Freedom from the insult of dwelling in a puppet's world,
where movements are started through brainless wires,
repeated through mindless habits,
where figures wait with patience and obedience for the
master of show,
to be stirred into a mimicry of life.
Rabindranath Tagore

Born September 11th, 1950, in the Narsingdi District of Bangladesh, Shahabuddin Ahmed had already exhibited his great strength of character, and zeal for freedom when taking time out from art school to fight as a platoon commander, in Bangladesh’s guerrilla resistance movement (Mukti Bahini), during the Liberation War (1971). Shahabuddin fought for his country’s eventual freedom from Pakistan and, at the age of 21, raised the Bangladesh flag (after a nine month struggle for freedom), on the roof of ‘Pakistan Radio’, December 16, 1971, at the culmination of the Bangladesh/Pakistan war. For this, in 2000, he received the ‘Shadhinota Padak’ (Independence Award - the highest civilian honour in Bangladesh).

In 1973, Shahabuddin finally graduated from the Dhaka Art College (now Fine Arts School of Dhaka). The then Prime Minister of Bangladesh (Sheikh Mujibur Rahman), encouraged Shahabuddin to go to Paris, France. Rahman (Bangabandhu, or ‘Friend of Bengal’) had suggested ‘…you must go, beat Picasso.’

Rahman’s suggestion, that Shahabuddin should become greater than Picasso, spoke not only of Picasso’s greatness as an artist, but also of Picasso’s ceaseless desire for peace. Picasso had spent many years painting of war and of peace. He had, after all, created one of the most memorable war paintings ever - Guernica, in 1937. Guernica, a painting which depicts the graphic horror of the bombing of a Spanish town, is as impressive in its size as it is in its content. Overall it stands at 25.6 feet wide and 11 feet tall, and its full impact can be seen in Museo Reina Sofia, in Madrid. Picasso’s ‘Dove of Peace’, his symbol for the First International Peace Conference, in Paris 1949, became ‘the international emblem of the Peace Movement and a symbol of hope in the Cold War period’ (it mentions in the Tate Liverpool exhibition ‘Picasso: Peace and Freedom’, 2010). It was in Paris, that Shahabuddin finally saw the works of Pablo Picasso, up close and personal.

Armed with that scholarship from the French government, Shahabuddin Ahmed arrived in Paris to study painting at the Ecole Superieure des Beaux-Arts de Paris. Coincidently, it was in the autumn of 1974, that Francis Bacon arrived back in Paris, and settled into a studio apartment, at 14 rue de Birague, in the Marais district near the Place des Vosges. Paris was a city beloved of Francis Bacon, and one he spent much time visiting, discovering his own love for Picasso’s work, in Pierre Rosenberg’s gallery (1927).

In 1977, while still in Paris, Shahabuddin suffered the fate of all displaced persons and, ironically (as Paris was seen as the centre of post-war French Existentialism), had an existential crisis. Shahabuddin was, like Jean-Paul Sartre’s character Antoine Roquentin (La Nausée, or Nausea, published in 1938) thrown into worry about his existence, his worth and the worth of his painting. Sartre, of course, is renown for commenting ‘Man is condemned to be free; because once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does. It is up to you to give [life] a meaning’ An obvious nod to Friedrich Nietzche’s ‘Freedom is the will to be responsible to ourselves’. Shahabuddin’s crisis dissipated upon experiencing the power of Francis Bacon’s exhibits at Galerie Claud Bernard, 5,7,9, rue des Beaux-Arts, Paris 6, galvanising Shahabuddin, once again, into action, but this time with a paintbrush.

In those traumatised images and the free strokes comprising Bacon’s imagery, Shahabuddin had found his meaning. He was encouraged to continue, to wrestle his freedom to paint, and Shahabuddin had recognised in Bacon’s imagery, a kinship. Shahabuddin was adapt Bacon’s style, style, discarding the obvious horrors and the inherent violence of Bacon’s paintings, as Shahabuddin had had enough violence during the war, as his 2018 exhibition ‘Shanti’ (Peace, May - April 2018)) attends.

Shahabuddin had found his expression, the freedom and the will to energise his will onto canvas.
Thomas McEvilley, in his book ‘Capacity: The History, the World, and the Self in Contemporary Art and Criticism’ (1997), when talking about the Dakar Festival for the Revival of African Arts, made this comment - ‘Bangladeshi Ahmed Shahabuddin’s expertly executed canvases seemed derived in part from Francis Bacon.’ Life has repeatedly brought Shahabuddin within the periphery of Bacon, and his work.

In time, due to the similarities in his work to that of France Bacon, Shahabuddin had earned the dubious title of ‘Little Bacon’ (according to an interview the artist had with Snehangshu Adhikari, in The Sunday Indian (April 3, 2011). It was a title Shahabuddin spent a lifetime dispelling, which he has by the sheer dint of his hard work and diligent concentration on moving forward with his style.
As Shahabuddin’s works matured, he too became exhibited in the very same gallery, in Paris, in which Francis Bacon's works had been exhibited. Bacon and Picasso had loomed large in Shahabuddin’s early life as a painter, but they were not the only Modernist’ painters who had shaped that borrowed style.

There is little doubt that Shahabuddin, this vital giant of Bangladesh painting imparts his the full force of his passion into his art, brimming with visual intensity and puissance, just as he had once flung himself into the fray to create freedom for his country. He and his work have also commonalities with Bangladesh artist Shilpacharya (great teacher) Zainul Abedin. As we witness in Zainul Abedin’s drawings and paintings, we have his sense of great movement, as that in Shahabuddin’s works too. This is shown in works such as  Zainul Abedin’s Rebel Cows’ (1975), ’Sangram’ (Struggle, 1976) and one untitled piece which was executed in 1967. It is an ink and pastel, on paper, depicting a group of figures in furious movement.

Shahabuddin Ahmed’s art frequently echoes the untamed organic landscapes imagined by British Graham Sutherland’s ‘organic’ surrealisms, such as ‘Green Tree Form’ (1940), ‘Twisted Tree Form’ (1944) and ’Sleeping Woman’ (1953). Bacon and Sutherland had been friends during the 1940s, with Sutherland advancing Bacon’s career, and with much painterly cross-fertilisation occurring. This becomes evident in paintings such as Sutherland’s ‘Gorse on Sea Wall’ (1939). It is no wonder then, that those ‘echoes’ occur, passed, as they had been, from Sutherland to Bacon, and to Shahabuddin. It is that metamorphosis, that evolving which is the product of freedom of the artist’s mind, freedom to experiment, for the artist to create without fear.

It is an arts tradition. ‘Apprentice’ (student) becomes a ’Journeyman’ at the completion of his/her apprenticeship and, eventually, a ‘Master’ in their own right. Although those antediluvian practices have evolved into studentship and teacher/lecturer/artist the relationship and its value remains. The Louvre in Paris (1793) and the Victoria & Albert Museum (1852) were created for the purpose of students gaining inspiration from past artists, who were considered masters of their trade and exemplars for students to learn from.

In 2017, Mexico’s Fine Arts Palace held the exhibition ‘Picasso & Rivera. Conversaciones a través del tiempo’ (Conversations Across Time). It charted a cross-fertilisation between two great artists, Pablo Picasso from Spain and Diego Rivera from Mexico, their similarities, their friendship and their ultimate falling out. Separately, they had both studied at the San Fernando Royal Academy, Madrid, and separately moved to Paris, finally meeting in 1914. Rivera had ‘sampled’ Picasso’s ‘Cubism’, while Picasso had ‘sampled’ Rivera’s ‘Muralism’.

Another great Spaniard, Salvador Dalí, countryman to and admirer of Picasso’s works, engineered a mutual friend (the Spanish poet Federico Garcia Lorca) to obtain an introduction to Picasso. This occurred in Paris, in 1926. The influence of Picasso’s work, over Dalí, was chartered in the exhibition Picasso Dalí/Dalí Picasso at Museu Picasso, Barcelona, in 2015. Like Picasso’s relationship with Rivera, Picasso had a strained relationship with Dalí also. Picasso was to go on to influence many painters, including those from the Indian sub-continent, with artists such as F N Souza, Tyeb Mehta, M F Husain and, of course, Shahabuddin Ahmed admiring his freedom to create.

Shahabuddin’s paintings are about freedom. But not only the freedom from the act of war, or the ravages of war and the imprinting of such on the mind of a survivor, but a freedom of the spirit, of the soul (if we deign to use such language) and a freedom to experiment with creativity. Shahabuddin’s struggle has not been just to wrestle with the after effects of war, or to represent the horrors or war in a new fashion, but to present his work as his own, freed from the strictures of being a ‘Little Bacon’, or bound to another artist’s vision of the world.

It would be a mistake to consider Shahabuddin’s work to be simply a ‘working out’, in his psyche, of the traumas and dislocations of war, as some have intimated in the Indian press (Daily Sun). Even with his last exhibition (in Kolkata’s Ganges Art Gallery) ‘Shanti’, there was an underlining murmur of his days at war, Bangladesh’s liberation, the struggle etc. While this is undeniably true, and Shahabuddin has never denied the impact of the ‘Liberation’ war on him and his work, nor the fact that he had been galvanised into action by the repressions inherent with the rule of Pakistan over his country. However, this should not be allowed to define the past four decades of this artist’s work. Shahabuddin’s vitality, seen in his paintings, has moved him on from war to peace (‘Shanti’, or Peace is the name of his exhibition).

Of course, it is difficult to talk of peace (Shanti), without talking first of war. One dictionary definition tells us that ‘Peace’ is ‘a state or period in which there is no war, or a war has ended'. Another speaks of ‘no violence’. It is perfectly understandable why so much emphasis has been laid on Shahabuddin’s connection to a series of events which culminated with Bangladesh being created, freed from oppression, yet that is not the entire story.

As Shahabuddin (in an interview with Zahangir Alom, in The Daily Star, December 16, 2016) reminds us, artistic freedom is ‘….a difficult thing in the world. It is protected (by law) only in France.’ the French had that liberty, that freedom, enshrined in law from July 2016. While in other (South Asian) countries (according to The State of Artistic Expression) ‘Artists practice a degree of self-censorship for fear of losing state patronage’. Srirak Plipat Executive Director of Freemuse (an independent international organisation advocating for and defending freedom of artistic expression) recently stated…

‘Freedom of artistic freedom and creativity does matter. It is recognised as a human right in key international human rights laws. But what makes artistic freedom matter is that it makes us who we are as a human being in society.’

Artists, or in common parlance ‘creatives’, may be identified as human agents having autonomy, or free-will, to decide (what to do), and the ability to act upon that free-will without repercussions. To be truly free, to be liberated in the mind to paint, free from the pettiness of social strictures, politics etcetera is, sadly, becoming rarer across the globe. Countries which once embraced the idea of equality and freedom, change, and revert to old ways. France is the exception, hence Shahabuddin’s oscillation between his newly found home in Paris and the home that he fought for in Dhaka. Freedom has its own price.