Murtaza Bashir, one of the brightest stars of Bengali art has passed away from us. He was suffering from coronavirus infection.
The 88-year-old painter also had to undergo hospital treatment multiple times for various physical complications before. He had heart disease besides lung and kidney complications.
Murtaza Bashir, the youngest son of The Bengal’s GyanTaposh Dr. Muhammad Shahidullah, was born on 17 August 1932.
Murtaza Bashir’s education career started at the Navkumar Institute in Dhaka, then he studied at the Coronation Institute of Bogra, Dhaka Government Institute of Arts (now the Charukala Academy of Dhaka University) and the Kolkata Asutosh Museum.
He also studied in the Italian Florence Academy, del Belle Arti, in painting and frescoes, and later in the Ecole Nacional Superior de Bozart and the Academy Goetze mosaic and prints in Paris. In 1978, he displayed museums and educational institutions in eight states of the United States for a month at the invitation of the U.S. government.
Later, at the ICCR Fellowship, he exhibited various museums in India to study the ‘Bangla art heritage’. Later, he also went to India to study the ‘Temple Terracotta Art’.
In 1955 he started his career as a drawing teacher at Nawabpur Government High School in Dhaka. In 1973 he joined the Charukala Department of Chittagong University as An Assistant Professor. He retired as a professor in 1998.
Murtaza Bashir was also at the forefront of the protest, in the language movement of 1952, the liberation war of 1971 and the anti-neo-dictatorship movement of the nineties.
“Dewal”, “Shahid Shironam”, “Kalema Taiyaba” – these are few of his famous series. He is the founder of an art form called “The Abstract Reality”. Murtaza Bashir won the Shadhinota Padak in 2019, Academy of Arts award in 1975, Ekushey Medal in 1980 for his contribution to the art.
