Ravindranath Tagore as Painter : A Less Known Facet of His Life

I am sure that most of us know  Ravindranath Tagore as a poet, composer, educationist .  Born in Calcutta in 1861, Tagore was perhaps the most important literary figure of Bengali literature; he was indeed the first non-European to win the esteemed Noble Prize in Literature. An ambassador for India and its culture, his international influence and popularity was considerable and could arguably be compared to that of Gandhi, who himself referred to  poet as ‘Mahatma’ – the great soul. But very few know that he was painter par excellence. In fact, when  I saw today nearly 250 paintings  done by him, I was amazed to see the variety, depth and details . After great efforts, in 150 birth centenary year  of Tagore, National Gallery of Modern Arts Mumbai arranged  an exhibition “The Last Harvest”  showcasing his rare paintings from today. 

 These paintings are curated by Professor Raman Siva Kumar of Visva-Bharati University,  The works of art in the exhibition are drawn from  the prestigious collections of more than 2000 paintings at Visva Bharati, Santiniketan and from the National Gallery of Modern Art, New Delhi.

The exhibition was supposed to be inaugurated by Chandresh Kumari Katoch, Minister of Culture but due to last minute change, the honour was done by eminent artist  Akbar Padamsee.

Tagore started painting relatively late in his life, but it did not prevent him from becoming one of India’s most revered Modern artists.  

Tagore at the age of 67 fell under the enchantment of lines when he discovered that his hand was moving automatically across the pages of his manuscripts transforming the scratches and erasures into designs. For the next 12 years of his life he harnessed his new-found love for painting and produced nearly 2,000 paintings. 

The majority of the works comprise haunting heads, romantic figures, and melancholy landscapes. Then there are dancing figures as well as fantastic and bizarre forms. What is remarkable about these works painted some 75 to 80 years ago is their timeless quality. Rising beyond its immediate context, Tagore’s art continues to communicate with new generation in new ways and with new meanings.

The drawings and paintings of the poet had richly traced the extraordinary inner journey of a complex individual through the ecstatic affirmation of existence manifest as rhythm-articulate inherent in form self-referent, towards, to the convinced cognition of individuated imagery as dramatic characterization of concepts and associations, being the total fantasy of the emotional world.

Rabindranath’s life, his works and the history of his institutions mark a progress from nationalism to universal humanism. His paintings belong to the period of universal humanism and linked as they may be to personal experiences they have a universal appeal. In consonance with it Rabindranath did not title his drawings and paintings. He also did not date most of them. Thus they come to us as an open-ended oeuvre, encouraging us to respond to them with our sensibilities and find linkages between them. In other words he encourages the viewers to embark on a curatorial process. This exhibition is one such effort.

In this exhibition the works are grouped into what may be considered four important facets of his oeuvre :

 1. His earliest paintings grew out of the doodles he did in his manuscripts while attempting to turn crossed out words and discarded lines into visually exciting motifs. These have an element of playful inventiveness and involve morphological cross-projections that defy perceptual experience. If the subliminal played an important part in his first paintings, painting itself led him to pay attention to the pageant of forms in nature. 

 2. The landscapes included in these selections are a token of this shift. As he progressed he also began to see the human body not merely as form but as gestures carrying within them the seeds of visual narration and theatre – ambivalent as they may remain without the benefit of names. 

 3.  As a playwright and actor Rabindranath was sensitive to gesture and its dramatic and narrative potential; the paintings in this group bring this into focus. 

 4.  This group consists of his representations of the human face into which he reads traces of social and personal life. They are products of observation and psychological probing.

                      

 Ms. Phiroza Godrej  shared reason of naming this exhibition as  " The Last Harvest ". For Rabindranath who welcomed contact with other cultures to foster creativity, and for whom the touchstone of authenticity was not the lineage of one’s language but one’s ability to make it one’s own, the value of art lay not in its source or style but in being an imperative of life. And painting was the last enchantment of his life, his last personal imperative. ‘I am hopelessly entangled in the spell that the lines have cast all around me…. If I were a free agent... unburdened by any care,’ he wrote to close friend in 1928 just when he was embarking on his career as a painter, ‘I would live by the Padma and gather a harvest of pictures and nothing but pictures to load the Golden Boat of Time with.’ He was burdened with too many commitments to allow himself that privilege but the harvest has been good (well over two thousand paintings in thirteen years) and this exhibition carries a small part of it eighty years after he himself had ferried it across the world for the first time.