Bangladesh

Peace

By Murtaza Bashir. Bangladesh. 1967

Oil on canvas.

103 × 154.5 cm. Inv. No. 4742 II

Received in 1967 from the Committee for Cultural Exchange attached to the USSR Council of Ministers, Moscow. First publication.

Murtaza Bashir belongs to the middle generation of Bangladesh artists. In 1954, he graduated from the Government Institute of Arts in Dacca, and in 1956-58 he studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Florence and then in Paris. Since 1954 Bashir has contributed to many art exhibitions in Dacca and also in America and Europe, as well as in the Soviet Union. Peace is a recurrent theme in Bashir's works. The girl with a flower in her hand is both a symbol of the hopes and aspirations of mankind and a symbol of the future. The radiant sun greets the girl and floods the whole world with its generous light. The picture is pregnant with complex symbolism and some of its details are not easy to interpret. But the painting is appealing with its cheerful and radiant colouring which is evocative of works of folk art.