Trajectory of the great poet-painter Rabindranath Tagore

Rabindranath 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 Gandhi.

He began painting relatively late in his career when he was in his sixties. Nevertheless he produced thousands of works and was the first Indian artist to exhibit his works across Europe, Russia and the United States in 1930. His painting style was very individual, characterised by simple bold forms and a rhythmic quality, and later served to inspire many modern Indian artists.

His artistic adventure began with doodles that turned crossed-out words and lines into images that assumed expressive and sometimes grotesque forms. They were unplanned and shaped by accidents and intuitive decisions but often seem to carry memories of ‘primitive’ art objects he should have seen in books and museums.

Something of this spilled into his early paintings. Many of them represent animals, but they are seldom of the real ones we know of; more often they represent what he has described a 'probable animal that had unaccountably missed its chance of existence’ or 'a bird that only can soar in our dreams. This led him to the creation of an antediluvian menagerie.

Spurred by the same spirit of inventiveness he also took to cross projecting the movement of a living animal on to an imagined body, or a human gesture onto an animal body and vice versa. This exchange between the familiar and the unknown, the inhabitation of one in the other has led him to forms that are as expressive as they are inventive.

The human face is an obvious constant in Rabindranath Tagore’s work. It demonstrates his undiminished interest in human persona. As a writer, especially as a writer of short stories, he was used to linking human appearance with an inner human essence. When he took to painting he found a similar opportunity in the representation of the human face.

The display at London based V&A Museum is curated by Professor Raman Siva Kumar and organised in collaboration with the National Gallery of Modern Art, New Delhi, with the support of the Ministry of Culture, Government of India. The paintings are on loan to the V&A from the Visva-Bharati University and the National Gallery of Modern Art.

(Information courtesy:V&A Museum)