SOME GREATES PAINTERS

Michelangelo Buonarroti

Michelangelo Buonarroti was the greatest artist and prolific sculptor of all times.An artist, painter, architect and poet, Michelangelo Buonarroti, a man of the 16thcentury is known as the father of sculpting. " The David" , " Ceiling of the Sistine Chapel", "Pieta", "Bruges Madonna" etc are few of his creations that have earned him more name and fame than all others in recent history. Sculpting, a difficult profession needs great skill and precision to carve a desired artistic shape out of stone.

His childhood

Michelangelo Buonnaroti was born in 1475 in Caprese, Tuscany to Ludovico di Leonardo di Buonarotto Simoni and Francesca Neri. He lost his mother, when he was six years old. Michelangelo's childhood had been grim and lacking affection. His father sent him to the school where his master, Francesco Galeota taught grammar. Here he met Francesco Granacci six years older than him, who was learning the art of painting in Ghirlandaio's studio. He became his friend and Michelangelo was inspired to pursue his own artistic vocation. He learnt the art of Fresco painting from Ghirlandaio. Yet he often thought of himself as a sculptor rather than painter and signed his name as Michelangiolo schultore.

His father wanted that Michelangelo completed his studies and later went on to become a successful businessman, who would preserve the Buonarroti position in society. But destiny had something else in store for his son. Michelangelo now 13 expressed his desire that he wished to apprentice in the workshop of the painter Domenico Ghirlandaio. After about one year of learning the art of fresco, Michelangelo went on to study at the sculpture school in the Medici gardens. Lorenzo dei Medici, appreciated his work and took Michelangelo to live with his family in his house in Via Larga, where he came across many political and
cultural personalities.Michelangelo had a strange passion of studying corpses which was strictly forbidden by the Church. But he obtained permission for his study by presenting a wooden Crucifix detail of Christ's face. However he had to interrupt his activities often as he fell ill due to contact with the dead bodies. He developed in depth knowledge about human anatomy.

Battle of the Centaurs and the Madonna of the Stairs ( 1489-92) are Michelangelo's early life creations.In Madonna of the Stairs, Mary, Mother of God, sits on the rock of the church. The child curls back into her body. She foresees his death, and his return on the stairway to heaven.His second work, Battle of the Centaurs was another small relief. His tutor read the myth of the battle of the Lapiths against the Centaurs. The wild forces of Life, locked in heroic combat. At the age of 16, his mind was a battlefield, his love of pagan beauty, the male nude, at war with his religious faith.. One spiritual, the other earthly.

In 1494 he fled from Florence to escape Charles VIII and went to Bologna .One seeing the reliefs by Jacopo della Quercia, he sculpted a bas-relief for the Duomo of San Petronio.In 1495 he returned to Florence and created the Drunken Bacchus (Bargello) his first large-scale sculpture. A magnificiant work of the pagan art, it was considered the finest during the times of Renaissance in Rome.

Michelangelo also carved a youthful St. John and a Sleeping Cupid, now both are lost. The cupid was so skillfully carved that it looked like an antique and it was passed off as an authentic work of art in Rome. This forgery and recommendation by the famous Lorenzo helped him gain wealth and power which was otherwise unattainable for a young artist .

The magnifiancant Pieta

Before Michelangelo was 25, he gave to the world one of the finest works of European art, the marble Pieta.During 1498-1500 he sculpted the Pieta at the Saint Peter's Basilica.It is the statue of the youthful Mary holding the dead Christ in her arms. She has an expression of resignation on her face. Few days later he overheard someone say, that the work was not done by Michelangelo.This enraged Michelangelo and he inscribed on it " MICHEL ANGELUS BONAROTUS
FLORENT FACIBAT meaning "Michelangelo Buonarroti, Florentine, made this ".
However he later regretted this act and determined never to sign his own work.
He came back to Florence between 1501 and 1505 and, proceeded to carry out a series of masterpieces, the Doni Tondo (Uffizi), the Pitti Tondo (Bargello), the lost cartoon for the fresco of the Battle of Cascina and the marble statue of David (Galleria dell'Accademia), which was placed outside the entrance to Palazzo Vecchio as a symbol of the Second Republic as well as of the Renaissance ideals of free men and masters of fate.

The final years " St. Peter's Basilica"

In 1546 Michelangelo was made chief architect. The St Peter's Basilica was another remarkable addition to his list of creations. He was now in his seventies when he accepted this mighty responsibility. He considered it as a duty and a mission entrusted to him by God. On February 18, 1564, just two weeks shy of his eighty-ninth birthday, the artist left for his heavenly abode.

Leonardo da Vinci

Born: 15 April 1452

Birthplace: Vinci, Italy

Died: 2 May 1519 (natural causes)

Best Known As: Painter of the Mona Lisa

Leonardo da Vinci is best remembered as the painter of the Mona Lisa (1503-1506) and The Last Supper (1495). But he's almost equally famous for his astonishing multiplicity of talents: he dabbled in architecture, sculpture, engineering, geology, hydraulics and the military arts, all with success, and in his spare time doodled parachutes and flying machines that resembled inventions of the 19th and 20th centuries. He made detailed drawings of human anatomy which are still highly regarded today. Leonardo also was quirky enough to write notebook entries in mirror (backwards) script, a trick which kept many of his observations from being widely known until decades after his death.

Leonardo da Vinci means "Leonardo from the town of Vinci," and thus he is generally referred to in short as "Leonardo" rather than as "da Vinci"... He received a fresh burst of public interest in 2003 with the publication of The Da Vinci Code, the bestselling thriller by author Dan brown.

Italian painter, engineer, musician, and scientist. The most versatile genius of the Renaissance, Leonardo filled notebooks with engineering and scientific observations that were in some cases centuries ahead of their time. As a painter Leonardo is best known for The Last Supper (c. 1495) and Mona Lisa (c. 1503).

Leonardo's great reputation in science and invention is posthumous, based on the translation and publication of his coded notebooks in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. In his lifetime, in addition to his famous paintings, he was known for his engineering of canal locks, cathedrals, and engines of war. The notebooks reveal Leonardo's correct interpretations of anatomy, explanations of physical concepts such as inertia, and sketches for working parachutes and helicopters, all well in advance of those ideas entering the scientific record.

(born April 15, 1452, Anchiano, Republic of Florence — died May 2, 1519, Cloux, France) Italian Renaissance painter, sculptor, draftsman, architect, engineer, and scientist. The son of a landowner and a peasant, he received training in painting, sculpture, and mechanical arts as an apprentice to Andrea del Verrocchio. In 1482, having made a name for himself in Florence, he entered the service of the duke of Milan as “painter and engineer.” In Milan his artistic and creative genius unfolded. About 1490 he began his project of writing treatises on the “science of painting,” architecture, mechanics, and anatomy. His theories were based on the belief that the painter, with his powers of perception and ability to pictorialize his observations, was uniquely qualified to probe nature's secrets. His numerous surviving manuscripts are noted for being written in a backward script that requires a mirror to be read. In 1502–03, as military architect and engineer for Cesare Borgia, he helped lay the groundwork for modern cartography. After five years of painting and scientific study back in Florence (1503–08), he returned to Milan, where his scientific work flourished. In 1516, after an interlude under Medici patronage in Rome, he entered the service of Francis I of France; he never returned to Italy. Though only some 17 completed paintings survive, they are universally seen as masterpieces. The power of The Last Supper (1495–97) comes in part from its masterly composition. In the Mona Lisa (c. 1503–06) the features and symbolic overtones of the subject achieve a complete synthesis. The unique fame that Leonardo enjoyed in his lifetime and that, filtered by historical criticism, has remained undimmed to the present day rests largely on his unlimited desire for knowledge, a trait that guided all his thinking and behaviour.

Leonardo Da Vinci's workshop, which was located in the Santissima Annunziata convent, in Florence, was discovered last month. It still had several of Da Vinci's frescoes on the walls. Some believe that Lisa Gherardini, the woman who was most likely the model for his painting, the Mona Lisa, worshipped at the convent. (story

Leonardo da Vinci (də vĭn'chē, Ital. lāōnär'dō dä vēn'chē) , 1452–1519, Italian painter, sculptor, architect, musician, engineer, and scientist, b. near Vinci, a hill village in Tuscany. The versatility and creative power of Leonardo mark him as a supreme example of Renaissance genius. He depicted in his drawings, with scientific precision and consummate artistry, subjects ranging from flying machines to caricatures; he also executed intricate anatomical studies of people, animals, and plants. The richness and originality of intellect expressed in his notebooks reveal one of the greatest minds of all time.

Mona Lisa

The Mona Lisa was one of Leonardo's favourite paintings, and he carried it with him until he died. Today, it is regarded as the most famous painting in the world, and is visited by many thousands of people every year.

Who is this familiar figure? Many suggestions have been made, but the most likely candidate is Lisa Gherardini, the wife of a Florentine silk merchant.

Another more unlikely - but popular - theory is that the painting was a self portrait. There are certainly similarities between the facial features of the Mona Lisa and of the artist's self portrait painted many years later. Could this be why Leonardo gave the subject such an enigmatic smile?

Today, the Mona Lisa looks rather sombre, in dull shades of brown and yellow. This is due to a layer of varnish covering the paint, which has yellowed over the years. It is possible that the painting was once brighter and more colourful than it is now.

The Mona Lisa was stolen from the Louvre in 1911, by a former employee who believed the painting belonged in Italy. The thief walked out of the gallery with the picture underneath his painter's smock. He was apprehended by police two years later, and the painting was safely returned.

Look For - Leonardo has used a technique known as Sfumato - the blurring of sharp edges by blending colours - to leave the corners of the eyes and the mouth in shadow. It is this technique that makes the Mona Lisa's expression ambiguous.

The background of the painting has been made to look more hazy, with fewer distinct outlines than the foreground. This technique is known as aerial perspective, and Leonardo was one of the first painters to use it to give his paintings more depth.

Pablo Picasso

Pablo Picasso was born in Málaga, Spain, the first child of José Ruiz y Blasco and María Picasso y López. He was christened with the names Pablo, Diego, José, Francisco de Paula, Juan Nepomuceno, Maria de los Remedios, and Cipriano de la Santísima Trinidad.[1]

Picasso's father was Jose Ruíz, a painter whose specialty was the naturalistic depiction of birds, and the School of Crafts and a curator of a local museum. The young Picasso showed a passion and a skill for drawing from an early age; according to his mother, his first word was "piz," a shortening of lapiz, the Spanish word for pencil.[2] It was from his father that Picasso had his first formal academic art training, such as figure drawing and painting in oil. Although Picasso attended carpenter schools throughout his childhood, often those where his father taught, he never finished his college-level course of study at the Academy of Arts (Academia de San Fernando) in Madrid, leaving after less than a year.

century, Picasso, still a struggling youth, divided his time between Barcelona and Paris, where, in 1904, he began a long term relationship with Fernande Olivier. It is she who appears in many of the Rose period paintings. After garnering fame and some fortune, Picasso left Olivier for Marcelle Humbert, whom Picasso called Eva. Picasso included declarations of his love for Eva in many Cubist works.

In Paris, Picasso entertained a distinguished coterie of friends in the Montmartre and Montparnasse quarters, including André Breton, Guillaume Apollinaire, and writer Gertrude Stein. He maintained a number of mistresses in addition to his wife or primary partner. Picasso was married twice and had four children by three women.

In 1918, Picasso married Olga Khokhlova, a ballerina with Sergei Diaghilev's troupe, for whom Picasso was designing a ballet, Parade, in Rome. Khokhlova dinner parties, and all the social niceties attendant on the life of the rich in 1920s Paris. The two had a son, Paulo, who would grow up to be a dissolute motorcycle racer and chauffeur to his father.

Khokhlova's insistence on social propriety clashed two lived in a state of constant conflict. In 1927 Picasso met 17 year old Marie-Thérèse Walter and began a secret affair with her. Picasso's marriage to Khokhlova soon ended in separation rather than divorce, as French law required an even division of property in the case of divorce, and Picasso did not want Khokhlova to have half his wealth. The two remained legally married until Khokhlova's death in 1955.

Picasso carried on a long-standing affair with Walter and fathered a daughter, Maia, with her. Marie-Thérèse lived in the vain hope that Picasso would one day marry her, and hanged herself four years after Picasso's death.

The photographer and painter Dora Maar was also a constant companion and lover of Picasso. The two were closest in the late 1930s and early 1940s and it was Maar who documented the painting of Guernica.

After the liberation of Paris in 1944, Picasso began to keep company with a young art student, Françoise Gilot. The two eventually became lovers, and had two children together, Claude and Paloma. Unique among Picasso's women, Gilot left Picasso in 1953, allegedly because of abusive treatment and infidelities. This came as a severe blow to Picasso.

He went through a difficult period after Gilot's departure, coming to terms with his advancing age and his perception that, now in his 70s, he was no longer attractive, but rather grotesque to young women. A number of ink drawings from this period explore this theme of the hideous old dwarf as buffoonish counterpoint to the beautiful young girl, including several from a six-week affair with Geneviève Laporte, who in June 2005 auctioned off the drawings Picasso made of her.

Picasso was not long in finding another lover, Madoura Pottery, where Picasso made and painted ceramics. The two remained together for the rest of Picasso's life, marrying in 1961. Their marriage was also the means of one last act of revenge against Gilot. Gilot had been seeking a legal means to legitimize her children with Picasso, Claude and Paloma. With Picasso's encouragement, she had arranged to divorce her then husband, Luc Simon, and marry Picasso to secure her children's rights. Picasso then secretly married Roque after Gilot had filed for divorce in order to exact his revenge for her leaving him.

Picasso had constructed a huge gothic structure and could afford large villas in the south of France, at Notre-dame-de-vie on the outskirts of Mougins, in the Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur. Although he was a celebrity, there was often as much interest in his personal life as his art.

In addition to his manifold artistic accomplishments, Picasso had a film career, including a cameo appearance in Jean Cocteau's Testament of Orpheus. Picasso always played himself in his film appearances. In 1955 he helped make the film Le Mystère Picasso (The Mystery of Picasso) directed by Henri-Georges Clouzot.

Pablo Picasso died on April 8, 1973 in Mougins, France, while Picasso and his wife Jacqueline entertained friends for dinner. His final words were "Drink to me, drink to my health, you know I can't drink any more." He was interred at Castle Vauvenargues' park, in Vauvenargues, Bouches-du-Rhône. Jacqueline Roque prevented his children Claude and Paloma from attending the funeral.

About the Les Demoiselles d'Avignon Painting

With its hacked contours, staring interrogatory eyes, and general feeling of instability, Les Demoiselles is still a disturbing painting after three quarters of a century, a refutationof the idea that the surprise of art, like the surprise of fasion, must necessarily wear off. No painting ever looked more convulsive. None signalled a faster change in the history of art. Yet it was anchored in tradition, and its attack on the eye would never have been so startling if its format had not been that of the classical nude; the three figures at the left are a distant but unmistakable echo of that favourite image of the late Renaissance, the Three Graces. Picasso began it in the year Cezanne died, 1906, and its nearest ancestor seems to have been Cezanne's monumental composition of the bathers displaying their blockish, angular bodies beneath arching trees. Its other line of descent in Picasso's Spanish heritage. The bodies of the two caryatid-like standing nudes, and to a lesser degree their neaighbour on the right, twist like El Greco's figures. And the angular, harshly lit blue space between them closely resembles the drapery in El Greco's Dumbarton Oaks Visitation.

Vincent Van Gogh

Vincent Van Gogh died by his own hand, an impoverished failure in the eyes of the world. He had struggled to succeed in a number of fields: as an art dealer, teacher, missionary and only finally as a painter. He committed suicide at the very time his work was beginning to attract both critical approval and the enthusiasm of his fellow artists, yet today hi is probably the most popular and widely known painter in the entire history of art, known to millions through reproductions of his works. The contrast between the obscurity of his life and his universal posthumous acclaim has become in the popular imagination the prototype story of the modern artist: a poor & dejected outcast, descending into madness, but whose genius, inevitably only recognized after his early death, brings him immortality.

Van Gogh would not have despised this popularity, for above all else he wanted his painting to reach ordinary people & be a part of there lives. His great compassion for the suffering of others, together with the pain & loneliness he suffered himself, gave to his art a universality beyond dry intellectual or historical themes, & his life itself seemed to dramatize the very essence of the emotions that we all encounter, albeit less intensely. In this respect his paintings deal with things that are simple to recognize & easy to sympathize with, whatever our own particular experiences have been.

Not only do Van Gogh’s paintings address fundamental human emotions very directly, they also depict the real world square on. His subject matter was nearly always what was before his easel – concrete, familiar, everyday reality .Although he was highly literate, deeply absorbed in spiritual issues & had a thorough knowledge of artistic tradition, his work is never complicated by obscure allusions or layers of meaning intelligible only to the few. Although his paintings have great depth, this is never at the expense of direct impact. The obvious sincerity of his work is one of its chief attractions, & its emotional force is very directly conveyed through his painting technique. His brushwork is almost a form of speech, & a highly articulate one.

As well as expressing his own emotional state, Van Gogh’s art also tell us a great deal about the events of his life, since everything that happened to him was directly reflected in his subjects & how he painted them. This again makes him very approachable, an artist who keeps nothing hidden from his audience. However, the expression of his thoughts & feelings, & the description of events in his life were sot confined to his paintings. Throughout his life he recorded his intimate thoughts in a remarkable series of letters to his brother Theo, who worked as an art dealer in Paris. The two brothers were extremely close, sharing similar temperaments & concerns. Published after Theo’s death, this correspondence tells the same story as the paintings, of the many false starts in life, of his struggle for survival as a painter & of his mental collapse & periodic interments in a lunatic asylum. Through this intimate & moving letters it is possible to know Van Gogh as closely as his own brother did, & to follow the struggle of his life & the development of his art.

Background and early life

Van Gogh’s life reflected many of the central issues of his time, in particular religion & socialism, the two great formative influences on his life, which were also of crucial importance in the history of the 19^th century itself. He was the son of a Dutch Protestant minister, & throughout his early life he idolized his father & was himself deeply devout. He began his career, however, following in the footsteps of his uncle Vincent, who had been an important figure in the firm of Goupil & Co., picture dealers with branches in Paris, London & The Hague. Van Gogh worked for short periods at all three of these branches, but after seven years of increasing disillusionment both with his employers & with the business itself, he left, at the age of twenty-three.

He then travelled to England & thought for a while, first at a boy’s school on the south coast & then on the outskirts of west London. During this time he became more & more absorbed in the idea of an ascetic way of life & mystical, evangelical Protestantism. He decided to return to Holland to train for the ministry at a college in Amsterdam, but left after barely a year, disheartened by the need to study for what he saw as irrelevant academic exams. He decided to move to Brussels, where he enrolled in an evangelical missionary college, but extreme fervor of his convictions. After three months he was sent to preach amongst the miners of the Borinage region, but was dismissed for the excessive zeal with which he embraced & emulated the poverty of his surroundings. The intensity with which he approached life drove him to take his religious beliefs to what seemed their logical conclusion, & his desire to lead a life of poverty based on Christ’s own at the expense of the usual social or religious conventions led to a parting of the ways with his superiors. By the time when, as a struggling painter in the Hague, he had set up house with a prostitute whom he hoped to save from her former ways, he had quite broken away from the conventional morality of the established Protestant church, & later, when he left Holland for Paris, he even abandoned his belief in God. His early years as a devout Christian, however, were to remain with him in his painting, as was the deeply moral standpoint from which he viewed the world, evidenced by his choice of the poorest of society as his subjects. The manner in which he sacrificed all else to work as a painter also recalled his early life, & he himself compared his life to that of a monk, who lives only for his vocation.

In abandoning a Christian answer to the injustice & suffering of his times, Van Gogh drew closer to a more political stance. Although he was at no time directly involved in the political turmoil of the age, in which socialism was fast developing as a major force, he made it plain, both in his letters to Theo & in his paintings, where his sympathies lay. Even when standing in the relative comfort of his father’s parsonage at Neunen after the failure of his attempt to make a career as an artist in the Hague, it was the poor weavers & farm labourers that he drew. His plans for producing art together with his fellow artists mirrored the socialist ideal for society as a whole. While in the Hague he had developed a scheme whereby he & like-minded fellows would work as a co-operative, mass-producing cheap lithographic prints for the working class. The idea was that all the artists would work with no thought for personal gain, & if the business dissolved the remaining prints would be distributed free. In Paris, where socialist & anarchist views were common among his painter friends, he continued to dream of communities of painters working together.

The Potato Eater

From 1881 to 1885 van Gogh lived in the Netherlands, sometimes in lodgings, supported by his devoted brother Theo, who regularly sent him money from his own small salary. In keeping with his humanitarian outlook he painted peasants and workers, the most famous picture from this period being The Potato Eaters (Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam; 1885). Of this he wrote to Theo: `I have tried to emphasize that those people, eating their potatoes in the lamp-light have dug the earth with those very hands they put in the dish, and so it speaks of manual labour, and how they have honestly earned their food'. In 1885 van Gogh moved to Antwerp on the advice of Antoine Mauve (a cousin by marriage), and studied for some months at the Academy there. Academic instruction had little to offer such an individualist, however, and in February 1886 he moved to Paris, where he met Pissarro, Degas, Gauguin, Seurat, and Toulouse-Lautrec. At this time his painting underwent a violent metamorphosis under the combined influence of Impressionism and Japanese woodcuts, losing its moralistic flavour of social realism. Van Gogh became obsessed by the symbolic and expressive values of colors and began to use them for this purpose rather than, as did the Impressionists, for the reproduction of visual appearances, atmosphere, and light. `Instead of trying to reproduce exactly what I have before my eyes,' he wrote, `I use color more arbitrarily so as to express myself more forcibly'.

William Morris

William Morris, the son of a successful businessman, was born in Walthamstow, a quiet village east of London, on 24th March, 1834. After successfully investing in a copper mine, William's father was able to purchase Woodford Hall, a large estate on the edge of Epping Forest, in 1840.

Morris was educated at Marborough and Exeter College, Oxford. At university Morris met Edward Burne-Jones and Dante Gabriel Rossetti. The three men were all artists and formed a group called the Brotherhood. During this period their work was inspired by the history, ritual and architecture of the Medieval period. Morris and Burne-Jones were committed Anglicans and for a time they talked of taking part in a "crusade and holy warfare" against the art and culture of their own time.

Members of the Brotherhood were influenced by the writings of the art critic, John Ruskin, who praised the art of medieval craftsmen, sculptors and carvers who he believed were free to express their creative individualism. Ruskin was also very critical of the artists of the 19th century, who he accused of being servants of the industrial age.

In 1857 Morris joined with Edward Burne-Jones and Dante Gabriel Rossetti to paint frescoes for the Oxford Union. He also began writing poetry and in 1858 his book The Defence of Guenevere and Other Poems was published.

Morris and his Pre-Raphaelite friends formed their own company of designers and decorators. As well as Burne-Jones and Rossetti, the group now included the architect Philip Webb and Ford Madox Brown. Morris, Marshall, Faulkener & Co, specialized in producing stained glass, carving, furniture, wallpaper, carpets and tapestries. The company's designs brought about a complete revolution in public taste. Their commissions included the Red House in Upton (1859), the Armoury and Tapestry Room in St. James's Palace (1866) and the Dining Room in the Victoria and Albert Museum (1867). In 1875 the partnership came to an end and Morris formed a new business called Morris & Company.

Despite the large number of commissions that he received, William Morris continued to find time to write poetry and prose. His work during this period included The Life and Death of Jason (1867), The Earthly Paradise (1868) and the Volksunga Saga (1870).

In the 1870s Morris became upset by the aggressive foreign policy of the Conservative Prime Minister, Benjamin Disraeli. In began writing to newspapers and publishing pamphlets where he attacked Disraeli and supported the anti-imperialism of the Liberal Party leader, William Gladstone. However, he became disillusioned with Gladstone's Liberal Government that gained power after the 1880 General Election and by 1883 Morris had become a socialist.

Morris joined the Social Democratic Federation (SDF) and began contributing articles to its journal Justice. However, Morris was soon in dispute with the party leader, H. H. Hyndman. Morris shared Hyndman's Marxist beliefs, but objected to Hyndman's nationalism and the dictatorial methods he used to run the party.

In December, 1884, Morris left the SDF and along with Walter Crane, Eleanor Marx and Edward Aveling formed the Socialist League. Strongly influenced by the ideas of William Morris, the party published a manifesto where it advocated revolutionary international socialism. Morris was also the main contributor the the party's journal, Commonweal.

Over the next few years Morris wrote socialist pamphlets, sold socialist literature on street corners, went on speaking tours, encouraged and participated in strikes and took part in several political demonstrations. In July, 1887 Morris was arrested after a demonstration in London. Four months later he participated in what became known as Bloody Sunday, when three people were killed and 200 injured during a public meeting in Trafalgar Square. The following week, a friend, Alfred Linnell, was fatally injured during another protest demonstration and this event resulted in Morris writing, Death Song.

Morris devoted a lot of his time to political writing. This included Chants for Socialists (1883), The Pilgrims of Hope (1885) and the Dream of John Ball (1888). The following year Morris wrote one of his most important books, News from Nowhere. The book, a Utopian fantasy, tells the story of a man who falls asleep after an evening at a Socialist League meeting. He wakes in the future to find England transformed into a communist paradise where men and women are free, healthy, and equal. Money, prisons, schools and government have been abolished and the industrial squalor of England in the 1880s has disappeared. At the close of the book, the man has returned to the present, but has been inspired by what he has seen and his determined to work for a socialist future.

In 1891 William Morris became seriously ill with kidney disease. He continued to write on socialism and occasionally was fit enough to give speeches at public meetings. Morris political views had been influenced by the anarchist theories of Peter Kropotkin. Morris was also sympathetic to syndicalism of Tom Mann. Although Morris supported trustworthy socialist politicians such as George Lansbury and Keir Hardie, he believed that socialism would be achieved through trade union activity rather than by getting socialists elected to the House of Commons.

In his last few years of his life Morris wrote Socialism, Its Growth and Outcome (1893), Manifesto of English Socialists (1893) The Wood Beyond the World (1894) and Well at the World's End (1896). William Morris died on 3rd October, 1896

Zainul Abedin

BORN:- Mymensingh, India -1914.

EDUCATION:- Graduated from the Government School of Art, Calcutta, 1938 with First position in 1st Class; appointed teacher of the Art School while still a student there. Attended the Slade School of Arts, London, United Kingdom, 1951-52.

MAJOR EXHIBITIONS:- All India Art Exhibitions at Calcutta, 1938; Exhibition on 1943 Famine, Calcutta, 1944; Exhibition of Muslim Artists, Calcutta, 1946; Exhibition of Paintings and Brush Drawings at the Imperial Institute, London, 1951; Exhibition at the Berkley Gallery, London, 1952; travelling exhibitions in Belgium, Paris, Ankara and Istambul; Exhibition at Lahore, Pakistan in 1953; Karachi in 1955; Exhibition of 52 works at Smithsonian Institution, Washinton D.C., USA in 1957; 'Life in Bangladesh', a 65 ft scroll exhibited at "Nabanna" (The Harvest), an exhibition of Artists at Dhaka, 1970; exhibitions of his works on the Guerrilla War in many arab cities to encourage the PLO fighters in 1970.

AWARDS:-

 'Governor's Gold Medal' in the All India Art Exhibition - 1938 for a group of water color landscapes, mostly on the river Brahmaputra.

 Life Membership of fazlul Huq Hall, Dhaka University in 1958;

 "Pride of Performance" the highest award for creative artists by the President of Pakistan in 1959;

 "Hilal-i-Imtiaz", a civilian title by the Pakistan Government in 1959 and, later, denounced the title in 1971;

 "Gold Medal" by the then USSR Government in 1961;

 Visiting Professor of Fine Arts, Peshwar University, Pakistan;

 Judge of the Biennale Exhibition of RCD countries at Tehran, Iran in 1966;

 Honorary President of Bangla Academy, 1972-74;

 Visiting Professor of Fine Arts, Dhaka University in 1973;

 Member of the Congress for World Unity in Philadelphia, USA in 1974;

 National Professor of Bangladesh in 1974;

 D. Litt by the University of Delhi, India.

OTHER NOTABLES:-

 First Principal-designate of the Government Institute at Dhaka, the first art school of Bangladesh in 1948;

 Organized the 'Nabanna' Exhibition and displayed a 65 foot long scroll depicting the story of rural Bangladesh, through its phases, from abundance to poverty, was contributed at the 'Nabanna' Exhibition in 1970, at the height of non cooperation movement against Pakistan regime. Nabanna exhibition was symbolic of the artists' protest and a milestone in demanding cultural and political freedom.

 A 30 ft long scroll, done in blank ink over wax outlines, depicting the impact of cyclones of 1970;

 One of the designer of the pages of the Constitution of Bangladesh;

 Founded the Folk Art Museum at Sonargaon, 20 miles southeast of Dhaka in 1975;

 Founded Zainul Abedin Shangrahashala, a gallery of his own works in Mymensingh in 1975.

COMMENTS:- Art critic, O. C. Ganguly wrote in 1944 on his Famine Sketches, " in the daring Bravado of his pitiless strokes there is a spontaneity, sincerity, and an uncompromising realism which is rare among modern artists of Bengal. He has, indeed, opened a new page in modern painting by his distinguished contributions. As truthful records of the history of Bengal in 1943, Abedin's drawings are invaluable documents. As a worshipper of beauty in the terrible phase of human life - le beau dans l'horrible - this artist has raised pictorial art to dizzy heights from the low level of silly sentimentalism, hitherto current in Bengal".
Sarojini Naido said, " They are more eloquent in their poignant appeal than the most eloquent and impassioned words".

Zainul Abedin died in cancer on May 28, in 1976, aged 62. He was buried in the campus of Dhaka University, beside the Dhaka University mosque, with access from the Bangladesh College of Arts and Crafts which he had founded. Rebel poet, Kazi Nazrul Islam is also buried here.

THE GREAT HOLOCAUST OF BENGAL

History is written by those who win a war and not by the losers. No wonder, the history of Second World War is written by British and American authors. We are told that the war was necessary to eliminate the evil of Nazism and Hitler from the earth. Nazism and Hitler are painted as devils because they killed six million Jews (a figure put out by British and Jew historians and disputed by many).

The last chapter in the history of Second World War was written in early October 1945 at the famous Nuremberg trial, when the four prosecuting nations -- the United States, Great Britain, France and Russia -- issued an indictment against 24 men and six organizations. The individual defendants were charged with the systematic murder of millions of people.

Sixty years after the end of the war, time has come to reopen the case and institute a fresh Nuremberg trial - this time against one of the prosecuting nations -- Great Britain -- for systematic and intentional murder of millions of people. This genocide was not confined to the Second World War. In fact, only its last episode was played out during the war. The ghastly genocide, which used hunger and starvation as tools, lasted for about eighteen decades and was carried out in Bengal, India (at present Bengal is partly in India and partly in Bangladesh) by the British colonial masters claiming about thirty million victims.

It started in 1770 with a big bang, when approximately one third of the total population of Bengal died because of a drought. About 10 million people died! East India Company, which had occupied the country five years earlier, did not even once attempt to introduce any measures of aid worth mentioning. British officers in India were happily reporting to their bosses in London about having maximized their profit through trading and export of food. (Incidentally, Bankim Chandra Chatterjee, the

prophet of Indian nationalism, wrote his celebrated novel "Anandamath" with the battle cry 'Bandemataram' in the context of the agony evoked by the ravages of the famine of 1770.)

It must be mentioned here that Bengal is a land of rivers and most fertile land of Ganges delta. Bengal was a granary of India till British came in. Every village had, and still has, a pond, which has fishes that can feed the village even when there is no rice. It needed British intervention to convert the lush green land of Bengal into famine-starved land.

Bengal had 30 or 40 famines (depending on how one defines famine) during 182 years of British rule in Bengal. There are no reliable accounts of the number of people who died in these famines. We have only the figures put out by British colonialists. But even given the limited data availability, once can see the barbaric face of British colonialism in India.

The last big famine in Bengal occurred between 1942 and 1945. At least four million people died during these three years. Some scholars believe that the number of dead was much higher (remember that the figure of four million is based on British sources). Notwithstanding the controversy about the number of dead, it is widely accepted that the famine was man-made. Nobel laureate, Amartya Sen, has demonstrated quite convincingly that the famine deaths were caused by British policies and not by drastic slump in food production.