Long undervalued, Bangladeshi artists begin to rise at auction – The Art Newspaper

The historically undervalued category of Bangladeshi Modernist painting is gaining traction at global auction amid a wider boom in South Asian art. This rise was evident at last month’s South Asian Modern and contemporary sales at Christie’s and Sotheby’s in New York, where 20th century works by Bangladeshi artists consistently outperformed their estimates.

Chiefly, top prices were achieved for works by Zainul Abedin. At Christie’s on 19 March, a 1969 oil painting by the artist, depicting traditional fishing boats used on the Bay of Bengal, sold for $119,700 against an estimate of $60,000 to $80,000.

Meanwhile at Sotheby’s on 17 March, one of his ink sketches made $69,850, almost ten times its $7,000 high estimate. Part of the Santal series, the sketch contains one of his recurrent motifs—a couple from a plain-land indigenous community in East Bengal. An oil painting of the same composition and theme sold at Sotheby’s in May 2024 for $380,000. In the last couple of years, seven works by Abedin have sold at auction for six-figure sums, with the record held by Sotheby’s sale of a black and white 1970 work on paper for £516,000 in September 2024, which is the highest price for any Bangladeshi artist at auction.

Perhaps Bangladesh’s foremost Modern artist, Abedin trained in colonial-era Calcutta, where he achieved fame for his depictions of the 1943 Bengal Famine. After the partition of India in 1947, he migrated to Dhaka, where he co-founded the first art school in East Pakistan (now Bangladesh), which churned out generations of prominent South Asian artists.

Abedin is the central figure in the development of Bangladeshi art. He worked in an entirely new idiom that derived inspiration both from the contemporary art of Calcutta, and from global Modernism, while at the same time staying rooted in the community and material culture of what is now Bangladesh. Abedin’s work owes much to Bengali folk art, but he stands out for his extraordinarily economical command of line.

But Bangladeshi art does not consist of Abedin alone. The New York sales also included works by his contemporaries Kamrul Hasan and Sheikh Mohammed Sultan, as well as his student, the abstract painter and printmaker Mohammad Kibria, whose 1967 canvas work made $44,000 against a $24,000 high estimate at Sotheby’s.

Kibria studied in Japan, and brought to his work a minimalist precision that underlies its seeming simplicity. Hasan and Sultan were both extremely prolific artists whose works are ill-represented on the international market; recent examples at auction have been decidedly sub-par, though still fetching healthy prices. Two works were by Hasan were offered at Christie’s, neither fetched more than $7,000.

Although the mid-20th century saw an explosion of creativity in Dhaka’s Art Institute, Bangladeshi art is little-known outside the country. Bangladeshi artists were shaped by the same forces as their Indian and Pakistani counterparts and brought to their work the same degree originality. And yet Bangladeshi art has received little attention on the international art circuit, with some of its best known artists, such as Safiuddin Ahmed, having never been sold at auction.

According to the Dhaka-based collector Durjoy Rahman, this is a problem of familiarity. “You can’t buy what you don’t know,” he says. “There’s never been a really strong exhibition of Bangladeshi art at an institution in the West, and there are very few publications about it in English.”

Bangladesh has long struggled to promote its artistic heritage: hundreds of its best paintings lie unseen in government storage units in Dhaka, victim to decades of dysfunction and corruption. And, with taste all too often following national lines, Bangladeshi capital has yet to break out onto the open international art market, although billions of dollars were reportedly siphoned out of the country illicitly in recent years.

Moreover, much of the art we call Bangladeshi was created during a period when Bangladesh was part of Pakistan; consequently, many fine works remained in private collections in Lahore and Karachi after the independence of Bangladesh in 1971, divorced from the community of artists and intellectuals who produced them. These works have rarely been exhibited or published. At least two successive auction records for Abedin were achieved by paintings from old Pakistani collections.

Are we seeing a bubble or the forging of a new market? Rahman thinks prices for Abedin are still “still nothing compared to other South Asian artists and compared to his art-historical contribution.” But it remains to be seen whether Abedin’s international auction success will extend to other Bangladeshi artists, whose local prices have consistently held high in Bangladesh, thanks to the growth of the country’s moneyed elite. Meanwhile in Dhaka and Karachi, many of the unseen masterworks of mid-century Bengali Modernism, remain, for now, off the market.