Celebrating an iconic painter’s achievements

A milestone exhibition at the V&A celebrates the 150th anniversary of the birth of poet-painter Rabindranath Tagore with a display of about 50 of his exquisite works, never before displayed outside India.

The legendary artist started painting relatively late in his career when he was past his fifties. Nevertheless he still produced thousands of artworks and was the first artist from India to showcase his works across the US, Europe and Russia in 1930. His style was characterized by simple bold forms, laced with a rhythmic quality that inspired many modern artists from the country.

Glancing at his evolution as an artist, a curatorial note mentions: “Rabindranath Tagore’s artistic adventure began with doodles that turned crossed-out words and lines into images that assumed expressive and sometimes grotesque forms. Although he was untrained as an artist and sometimes referred to his paintings as foundlings, painting also made Rabindranath more observant and sensitive to the visible world. The human face is an obvious constant in his work.

“As a motif that persists right through his artistic career, it demonstrates his undiminished interest in human persona. Movements and gestures in his paintings are usually more sombre than mime; they tease us into thinking and empathetic immersion rather than mere recognition.”

Curiously, he didn’t name his paintings, in an effort to free them from literary imagination, and also from his own concerns as a writer. By leaving them untitled, he probably wanted the viewers to encounter his works with their own sensibility. Tagore is best known as a poet and in 1913 was the first non-European writer to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Highly prolific, Tagore was also a composer and wrote the national anthems for both India and Bangladesh, as well as an educator, social reformer, philosopher and painter. In India, he is regarded as a national figure whose achievements are as important as those of Mahatma Gandhi.