LET me confess at once that my interest in look Ing at pictures stems from adolescent prurience. As a schoolboy 1 remember whiling away many hours in the British Council and USIS libraries gazing at the voluptuous Titans, the titillating Tintorettos and the recumbent Goyas: the list could go on. The beauty and magnificence of the female form was first revealed to me through these art books, and willy-nilly, as I began to leaf through them.

produced a thousand times cannot provide the same aesthetic satisfaction of reading a book that millions of other readers are reading simultaneously. Art books, reproductions and posters can develop taste. Increase awareness of trends and traditions and generate

prurience took a back seat, and I became fascinated by the power and mystery of great art. Later as a college and university student I started buying my own art books, not one of which cost more than Taka 20. It was as a graduate student in North America in the late '70s that I had my first truly exhilarating and liberating experiences of confronting great art face to face.

A painting or a sculpture, by the very nature of the art. re-

excitement: it is the next best tiding to an actual visceral contact with a real VariGogh. Eighteen years back when I first saw a real Van Gogh in the National Gallery in London I instinctively reached out to touch It and was promptly snubbed by one of those ubiquitous security men. Now I know better.

There are about a score of art galleries of various kinds in Dhaka and my hands are always in my pocket when 1 go to one of them. What Is of

Francaise; Goethe Instttut and a couple of others, have been sponsoring exhibitions for close to three decades; there are other galleries (art shops is a better word) like "Cezanne’s". "Jiras" and Haque's" which have been around for almost 20 years which occasionally mount exhibitions, but mostly stock object d art and paintings which range from the gauche to the barely mediocre to some really good ones. But in the last five or six years, a new trend in art galleries has emerged with Akku Chowdhury's "La Galerie" (1988) as the first of its kind.

The initial impulse behind the establishment of "La Galerie" was the Impulse of a sophisticated interior designer to provide a place for artists to exhibit their works and for art-

paramount importance is that these galleries afford viewers the opportunity of first hand experience of Bangladeshi art. Non-commercial institutional galleries (sometimes little more than a corridor and a room) like the Institute of Fine Arts DU; Shilpakala Academy; Alliance

loving home-makers (or corporate officers) to see and possibly buy some of them. As an interior designer, Akku Chowdhury found that blank walls had to be filled up and there was no place to buy good paintings: he solved his own problem by setting up "La Galerie." Now. five years later, the gallery Is booked heavily for a whole year with back to back exhibitions each week. The last two to three year> have also been very busy for "La Galerie" with weekly ex-

hibitions of artists good and bad. minor and major, well-known and anonymous, local and foreign. Perhaps a little too much of a good thing?

Since 1992. five or six new art galleries have sprung up in the most unlikely locations: "Shtlpangan" on Rd 4, Dhan-mandi, "Jojon" in Central Road, and "Gallery Tone" in the ground floor of a house off Rd No 1 in Dhanmandi. A cluster of art galleries in one area seems to be a good idea.

Certainly this phenomenon of galleries sprouting up in each street comer (a bit like the garments industry) is encouraging: these new galleries are giving artists — young and old — wails on which to bang their works, and art-lovers of all kinds (the ’' conscious, the serious, the 1