Aminul Islam

Metromedia Inc Art Collection – the Private Collection of John Werner Kluge

Sloan’s Auctioneers & Appraisers, Miami, 10 June 2001, lot 131

John Werner Kluge was a German-American media mogul and philanthropist, named as the richest man in America three times by Forbes Magazine. Kluge purchased stock in the Metropolitan Broadcasting Corporation in the 1950s and renamed the company in 1961 to Metromedia after an unprecedented expansion into holdings in television, radio and advertising. In 1986 the television station division was sold to 20th Century Fox Film studio.

An avid collector, his appreciation for the arts was extensive. His collection under the rubric of Metromedia Inc Art Collection encompassed art across diverse art genres including Old Masters, Impressionist and Modern, Post-War, Russian, Asian, Latin American, South Asian and Aboriginal art as well as silver, furniture and the decorative arts.

One of Kluge’s private residences was Morven Farm in Albemarle County, Virginia where he housed the majority of his art collection. He installed sculptures by greats such as François Auguste René Rodin, Aristide Joseph Bonaventure Maillol and Henry Moore in an outdoor gallery to enhance the historic landscape. The current lot is known to have been part of the Morven Farm Estate. In 2001, Kluge donated more than 7000 acres of the Morven property to the University of Virginia Foundation for educational and charitable purposes.

Not unlike the sentiments of rupture and displacement that many Indian and Pakistani artists felt at the time of Partition, their contemporaries in Bangladesh bore witness to the great upheavals and violence that arose from the establishment of East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) in August 1947. Just over a thousand miles away, while the Progressive Artists’ Group in Bombay formulated their modern approach to art, Bangladeshi artists from West Bengal migrated to Dacca (now Dhaka) and pioneered their own modern art movement. Celebrated artists Zainul Abedin, Quamrul Hassan, Shafiqul Amin and Safiuddin Ahmed were among the founders of Dacca Art College in 1948, launching the school as a center of art and culture and the first art institution in the city. Aminul Islam was a student in DAC’s inaugural class and an integral member of the next generation of artists who were unafraid to reinterpret the norm and (re)define the country’s visual language.

In 1953, Islam traveled to Florence on an Italian government scholarship to continue his art education at Accademia di Belle Arti di Firenze. During this time, Islam held several solo shows in Rome and Florence and honed his craft. His style underwent a radical change, moving beyond the representational and delving into abstraction. Islam returned to Dacca in 1956 and continued to refine his use of color and depth.

In the 1960s, Islam ‘emerged from his half-geometric and lyrical-cubist phase to [one of] pure abstraction. His two-dimensional forms assumed an extra dimension provided by ever-expanding space and dynamic colour schemes. Aminul’s abstraction is not an end in itself; it is rather a means of exploring the inner dimensions of objects.’ (S. Islam, Bangladesh Art: Collection of Contemporary Paintings, Society for Promotion of Bangladesh Art, Dhaka, 2003, p. 80)

The present work captures Islam’s maturation as an abstract painter and shows his interest in the essence of his subject, in this case, the night sky. Hues of gray, black, white and blue coalesce, revealing the almost cosmic elegance of a mountainous landscape. The seemingly weightless black moon against the white sky conveys the sensitive luminescence of moonlight. White Night & Black Moon illuminates Islam’s expertise in abstraction and the natural beauty he could capture with his brush.

This is the first time Sotheby’s is offering a work by Aminul Islam, marking an important recognition of the artist’s groundbreaking innovations in Bangladeshi art and a further expansion of the regional representation of South Asian modern and contemporary art.

“Painting, for me, is the best way to knowledge, the best means to participate profoundly in… global life.” - Aminul Islam (T. Hossain, ‘Aminul Islam: A modernist and experimental painter’, The Daily Star, 2009)