SM Sultan

At 71 years old, SM Sultan physical status not available right now. We will update SM Sultan's height, weight, eye color, hair color, build, and measurements.

Sheikh Mohammed Sultan (known as SM Sultan, born 10 August 1923 – 10 October 1994) was a Bengali decolonial artist who specialized in drawing and painting.

His early works, particularly impressionism, were influenced by western technology and methods, particularly in the works of art in 1976; and the Independence Day Award in 1993.

His works are included in numerous major exhibitions in Bangladesh, including the Bangladesh National Museum and the National Art Gallery (Bangladesh), the S.M.

The Sultan Memorial Museum and the Bengal Foundation are exhibiting in Istanbul.

Early life

Sultan was born in Machimdia village, British India's (now Narail District, Bangladesh), on August 10, 1923. He went to work for his father, a mason, after five years of primary education at Victoria Collegiate School in Narail. He had a strong artistic urge as an infant. He seized every opportunity to draw with charcoal, as well as his ability to model the buildings his father occupied. Sultan wanted to study art in Calcutta (Kolkata), but his family didn't have the means to send him. He eventually obtained financial assistance from the local zamindar and moved to Calcutta in 1938.

In the meantime, Sultan joined the Khaksar movement in British India, led by Allama Mashriqi. "His fluid movements through myriad social geographies and his closeness with some notable personalities, his involvement with Allama Mashriqi's Khaksar movement, which sought to organise the "self" and "Muslim sociality" laid the groundwork for decolonization; and his sojourns in America and Europe prepared him for his canvases, which soon became populated with muscular men and women. These were clear hints at the peasant population in which he was a member of.

Hasan Shahid Suhrawardy, a poet and art critic, revived him as Sultan S. M. Sultan and gave him accommodation in his house and the use of his library. Sultan did not fulfill the admissions requirements of the Government School of Art in 1941, but he was able to enroll in the school's leadership team with Suhrawardy. The school under Principal Mukul Chandra Dey stressed Old Masters' copying and developed beyond Indian mythological, allegorical, and historical subjects. Students were encouraged to draw modern landscapes and portraits based on original concepts from their own life experience.

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Career

Sultan left art school after three years in 1944 and travelled around India. He earned his living by illustrating portraits of Allied soldiers who encamped along his route. In 1946, he had his first exhibition in Shimla, India, a solo one. After Partition, two individual exhibitions in Pakistan followed: Lahore in 1948 and Karachi in 1949. None of his artworks from this period survived, largely due to Sultan's indifference towards preserving his work.

The Institute of International Education (IIE) in New York ran an International Arts Program, which brought exceptionally talented international artists between the ages of 25 and 35, as well as their country's ministry of education and the IEE, to the United States for a short stay. The institute offered round-trip transportation and grants for living expenses. The program included visits to museums, a period of artistic research or study at a school, interviews with leading American artists, and an exhibition of the visitors' work.

Sultan's official appointment by the government in Karachi made it possible for him to visit the United States in the early 1950s and show his work at the IEE in Washington, D.C.; at the International House of the University of Chicago; and in Ann Arbor, Michigan University. He returned to England later this year, where he participated in the annual open-air group exhibition at Victoria Embankment Gardens in Hampstead, London.

While teaching art at a school in Karachi, he came into contact with renowned Pakistani artists Abdur Rahman Chughtai and Shakir Ali, with whom he formed a lasting friendship. Sultan Sultan returned to Narail in 1953 after a period of living and painting in Kashmir. He settled in an abandoned building overlooking the Chitra River, where he lived with an eclectic collection of pets. He lived close to the land and far from the outside art world for the next two decades, earning a reputation as a whimsical recluse and a Bohemian.

Sultan's designs, such as his self-portrait, are distinguished by their simplicity and compactness. The lines are strong and well-developed. The Impressionists had influenced his early paintings. He used Van Gogh's impasto technique in his oils. His watercolors, mainly landscapes, are colorful and vibrant.

Nature and rural life are two of his paintings' themes. S Amjad Ali, a Pakistani writer who wrote in 1952, described Sultan as a "landscape artist." Any human figures in his films were secondary. Sultan painted from memory in Ali's view in a way that had no concrete identity or origins.

A change in Sultan's individual exhibition at the Khulna Club in 1969 and the first National Art Exhibition (a group exhibition) in Dhaka in 1975 brought about a change in his art.

Agricultural labourers were involved in everyday activities such as ploughing, planting, threshing, and fishing were front-row on his canvases. The countryside – farmland, rivers, and villages – was still present but as a backdrop. What made his figures, as well as those in Char Dakhal (1976), so a muscular physique was present. He made apparent the inner strength of Bangladesh's backbone, the sturdy, hardworking peasants, which would have been obscured in a more realistic picture.

Sultan did some of his best work in the 1970s and 1980s. In 1976, the Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy held an individual exhibition exhibiting his work. It was his first major exhibition and his first in Dhaka. He was selected as a member of the Asian Art Biennale in Dhaka last year. The book of his solo exhibition at the German Cultural Center in Dhaka in 1987 described how he perceived his subjects:

He described their place in his art:

The Sultan's works never contained urban elements or anything made by modern technology, which he considered imported. They are modern art in the sense that they broke with the artistic traditions of the past, but they are still figurative art with a story. He had no interest in abstract art.

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