‘I’m always observing body language and expressions of people while walking on the streets’
Jogen Majumdar is presenting a new show called ‘Into the Half Light and Shadow Go I’, featuring nearly 200 works from Chowdhury’s oeuvre.
MUMBAI: In artist Jogen Chowdhury’s works, the line that reshaped the borders of India became the line that reshaped the Indian figure. The 84-year-old artist, who reached Calcutta as a refugee in 1948, and who retired as an MP in the Rajya Sabha in 2020, has seen the ebb and flow of life. The people in his canvas, in crumpled saris and scaly skin, with bulging folds and loose faces, reflect the same churn.
“His figures are not presented as heroic, but as vulnerable beings, subject to various kinds of sufferings,” says curator Saumik Nandy Majumdar. “But, despite the fact that he’s looking at the pathos of society and the tragedies of the human condition, his works have an attractive, lyrical quality. Paradoxically, his works are both romantic and gloomy.”
With co-curator Jesal Thacker, and with Kolkata-based Gallery Art Exposure, Majumdar is presenting a new show called ‘Into the Half Light and Shadow Go I’, featuring nearly 200 works from Chowdhury’s oeuvre. Alongside, the duo has also co-authored a tome, ‘Shadow Lines: Tracing the Journey’ ( ₹6499), featuring about 1100 of his drawings and paintings. “In the book, the title of our editorial note is ‘The Empathetic Modernist’,” says Thacker. “It’s because he shows apathy — even conflict and violence — with an empathetic gaze. If you see one of his paintings, ‘Killer of a Pregnant Woman’, you’ll be distraught. The woman’s womb has been cut open, and there’s a beastly man over her. But, it has such an aesthetic and compassionate gaze, that it doesn’t drown you in defeat. The subject is dark, but the expression isn’t.”
Between drawing and painting
Over a breakfast of salmon and orange juice, in a rust-orange kurta and an ash-grey sleeveless jacket, Chowdhury, who is in town for the show, says, “I grew up in East Bengal before the Partition. When I came to this side, I saw refugees everywhere. That affected my mentality. You see people everywhere in India, so people became the main source of my work. Our culture, our life, our ambience informed my practice.”
Graduated from Government College of Art and Craft in Calcutta in 1960, and École des Beaux-Arts in Paris in 1968, Chowdhury’s two long stints have been as gallery curator at the Rashtrapati Bhavan and professor of painting at Santiniketan. “The first time I met Jogenda was at Santiniketan, when I was a student in the department of art history,” says Majumdar. “He was very friendly with us. By 1987, he had already established himself as a prominent artist, with a very signature style. Despite that, he never foregrounded his style while teaching. He always inspired the students to grow on their own and follow their own heart, mind and intellect.”
Largely in ink, watercolour and pastels, Chowdhury’s works are characterised by a dominance of black and a criss-crossing of lines within his figures, in which black tendrils end up looking like veins. “We did not have electricity while growing up, and I had to read by the hurricane lantern,” he says. “Because of a lack of proper light, I always used black ink. And, I have been working with cross-hatches since the beginning of my drawing. That was my natural expression in my work.”
Majumdar adds, “In his stylistic and creative contribution, Jogenda has been leading his own path. It includes the development of cross-hatching as a technique, a certain kind of figuration, the conceptual idea of how he looked at society and how he represented them. Along with artists of his time such as Bhupen Khakhar, he brought a fresh look to humanity.”
His figures, however, show a clear bias between the treatment of the purush and the mahila. Noted art critic Geeta Kapur had once written, “The female figure in Jogen’s oeuvre is almost always sympathetically portrayed. It places him closer to the high culture of Bengal — the novel and the cinema — where the woman tends to be valorised, redeemed, martyred: the man falls short. If the male is a foppish dandy, violent husband, bogus priest, or a corrupt intellectual, leader, bureaucrat, moneybag: this is not the end of the story. The male figure is not without tenderness.”
Chowdhury says, “I agree that the women are graceful and sensuous in my works, whereas the men are usually degenerate. If you look at patachitra paintings, Kalighat works or terracotta sculptures, the women have very rhythmic lines. I have not directly copied them, but they have affected me. Even the women I see around me indirectly influenced me. When I’m walking on the streets, I’m always observing the body language and expressions of the people.” Thacker explains, “He has a very intuitive, perceptive gaze, through which he’s perceiving life and pain. Where does it come from? What is the root of empathy? It is femininity. So, it doesn’t matter whether his figures are male or female; they will all be feminine. They will all have that soft look, because he sees women as a symbol of power and the mother of empathy.”
‘Into the Half Light and Shadow Go I’ takes place at Snowball Studios from November 5-25.
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