Indian and Pakistani period

Sultan left art school after three years, in 1944, and traveled around India. He earned his living by drawing portraits of Allied soldiers encamped along his route. His first exhibition was a solo one in Shimla, India, in 1946.^[4] Next, after Partition, came two individual exhibitions in Pakistan: Lahore in 1948 and Karachi in 1949. None of his artworks from this period survived, mainly due to Sultan's own indifference towards preserving his work.^[5][8]

The Institute of International Education (IIE) in New York ran an International Arts Program that brought exceptionally promising foreign artists between the ages of 25 and 35, selected jointly by their country's ministry of education and the IEE, to the United States for a stay of several weeks. The institute provided round-trip transportation and grants for living expenses. The program included visits to museums, a period of creative work or study at a school, consultations with leading American artists, and exhibition of the visitors' work.^[9][10][11]

Sultan's official selection by the government in Karachi made it possible for him to visit the United States in the early 1950s,^{[note 1][12]} and exhibit his work at the IEE in New York; at the YMCA in Washington, D.C.;^[13] in Boston; at the International House of the University of Chicago; and at Michigan University, Ann Arbor. Later he traveled to England, where he participated in the annual open-air group exhibition at Victoria Embankment Gardens, Hampstead, London.^[4][5]

The following year, while teaching art at a school in Karachi, he came into contact with leading Pakistani artists Abdur Rahman Chughtai and Shakir Ali, with whom he developed a lasting friendship. After a period living and painting in Kashmir, Sultan returned to his native Narail in 1953. He settled down in an abandoned building overlooking the Chitra River, where he lived with an eclectic collection of pets.^[5][14] He lived close to the land and far from the outside art world for the next twenty-three years, developing a reputation as a whimsical recluse and a Bohemian.^[4][15]

SM Sultan. Untitled (1952). Watercolor on card.

Sultan's drawings, such as his self-portrait, are characterized by their economy and compactness. The lines are powerful and fully developed. His early paintings were influenced by the Impressionists. In his oils he employed Van Gogh's impasto technique. His watercolors, predominantly landscapes, are bright and lively.^[5][16]

The themes of his paintings are nature and rural life.^[5] S Amjad Ali, writing in 1952 for Pakistan Quarterly, described Sultan as a "landscape artist." Any human figures in his scenes were secondary. In Ali's view Sultan painted from memory in a style that had no definite identity or origins.^[16]

Bangladeshi period

Between Sultan's 1969 individual exhibition at the Khulna Club, Khulna, and the first National Art Exhibition (a group exhibition), in Dhaka, in 1975,^[17] a transformation took place in his work.^[8][16]

SM Sultan. Char Dakhal (1976). Bengal Foundation.

Agricultural laborers engaged in everyday activities such as ploughing, planting, threshing, and fishing took center stage on his canvases. The landscape – farmland, rivers, villages – was still present, but as a backdrop. What was distinctive about his figures, such as those in Char Dakhal (1976), was their exaggeratedly muscular physique. In this way he made obvious the inner strength of the sturdy, hard working peasants, the backbone of Bangladesh, something that would have remained hidden in a more realistic depiction.^{[1][8][12][15]}

Sultan did some of his best work in the 1970s and 1980s. In 1976 the Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy put on an individual exhibition of his work. It was his first major exhibition and his first in Dhaka.^[1][14] The next year he was selected as a member of the panel of judges for the Asian Art Biennale in Dhaka.^[12] The catalog of his solo exhibition at the German Cultural Center, Dhaka, in 1987, described how he saw his subjects:

These people who lived close to the soil, who bore on their shoulders the burden of civilization did not appear to Sultan to be weak, debilitated, starving creatures who deserved pity and sympathy. Quite the contrary, he saw their bulging muscles, their vigorous torso, their overpowering vitality, their well-rounded buttocks and swelling breasts ready to come to grip with life.^[4]

The peasants were heroes to him. He described their place in his art:

The matter of my paintings is about the symbol of energy. The muscle is being used for struggling, struggling with the soil. Power of those arms drives the plough into the soil and grows crops. Labor is the basis and because of that labor of our farmers this land has been surviving over thousand of years.^[17]

Sultan's paintings never included urban elements or anything produced by modern technology, which he considered imported. They are modern art in the sense that he broke with the artistic conventions of the past, but they remained figurative art with a narrative. He had little interest in abstract art.^[1][16]

House of SM Sultan

SM Sultan Gold Medal

Bangladesh Shilpakala Academy introduced an award 'SM Sultan Gold Medal', named after SM Sultan. The award is given every year to a notable artist, during the festival marking the birth anniversary of SM Sultan.^[20] As of January 2020, the award recipients include Farida Zaman, Mustafa Monwar, Qayyum Chowdhury, Rafiqun Nabi, Ferdousi Priyabhashini, Hashem Khan, Abdul Mannan, Kalidas Karmakar, Hamiduzzaman Khan, Samarjit Roy Chowdhury and Murtaja Baseer.^[21]