August 7 marks 59 years since the passing away of Rabindranath Tagore. At the NGMA, curator Shashi Bala has put together a tribute and talks to Uma Nair about the beauty of a late harvest in life
Ram Kinkar Baij’s cement bust of Tagore opens the show and personifies a rare and primordial passion. Rough hewn and pondering, Baij’s cement bust of Tagore is not a eulogy; it is an exercise in reverence, it personifies Tagore as the Gurudev in all aspects — the thinker, the poet, the radical, the story-teller and above all the creator of Gitanjali.
Genesis
“His journey in art happened after his recognition as a writer world wide,” says Adwaita Gadanayak, DG, NGMA. “At the ripe old age of 63, Tagore became a painter.” His first exhibition of paintings and drawings was held at the Galerie Pigalle in 1930, Paris. Scholars say that Tagore had an early inclination toward representational art but had given up the hope of being a professional painter around 1900.
But he had private journals where he used to doodle and sketch. In 1924, on a visit to Argentina as editor and friend Victoria Ocampo’s guest, his doodles assumed more elaborate and expressive intent.
Tagore, the traveller
Tagore, the world traveller, had a deep interest in cross-cultural contacts. He deeply studied the art of the countries he travelled to. They formed an absorptive awareness and subliminally guided his thoughts. His inclination to know and understand other cultures contributed to his evolution as an artist. He became a painter and catalyst of modern art.
These influences on Tagore evolved over his lifetime and emerged as expressions of innovation and modernity through his paintings. Tagore’s paintings of heads, nature and women at NGMA are an outstanding example of his technique — the use of erasure, the application of colour and ink, the working and reworking of contours, the enigmatic energy, rhythm and freedom that attracted and drew people who saw his works.
Expression and animation
But as you look at what Tagore painted, there are large soulful eyes and pensive faces, which move with melancholy. When Tagore painted women, he drew them as if they belonged to the world of feminine fables, wrapped in their own circumstances, eyes filled with expressive gloom. When he wrote his short stories and plays, he linked human appearance with an inner human essence.
In his paintings, he represented the human face in the same manner. Here we see his representational skills and expressive assurance as we glimpse shadows of faces he encountered or remembered as he created them with a dark resonance and expansiveness of animated expression.
In yet another work, two lovers unite. For a moment, their delicate gaze gets locked. What is unforgettable in these heads and women seriesIJ With simple strokes, we see the outline of consistent contours that delineate the dark background reminiscent of a stormy night, as we imagine the power of a Rabindra Sangeet song sung by the venerated Rezwana Banya, the melody mirroring silently the cloud that gathers, emanating from an aerial kiss, perhaps between the messengers of love.
Nature and Tagore
Equally stunning are the landscapes and a few tree studies. Did painting allow Tagore to break away from the limitations of languageIJ Gadanayak answers, “Tagore felt that painting, unlike any other art form, was closer to nature and could be universally understood and shared. Through his travels, Tagore observed first-hand the rapid changes in the world during the early 20th century and the shaping of modern art in Europe and America.”
This show culled from the NGMA archives is a lesson in the history of art in the birth of modernism. Tagore’s own words reflect his deeper ruminations, “The Universe... talks in the voice of pictures and dance. In a picture, the artist creates the language of undoubted reality and we are satisfied with what we see. It may not be the representation of a beautiful woman but that of a commonplace donkey or of something that has no external credential of truth in nature but only in its own inner artistic significance.”
landscapes and lines
Tagore’s landscapes are a telling testimony of his love for nature.We can recall his poems Crescent Moon, The Palm Tree, as well as the perennial power of Gitanjali. In a letter from 1928 to Rani Mahalanobis, Tagore wrote, “The most important item in the bulletin of my daily news is my painting. I am hopelessly entangled in the spell that the lines have cast all around me. I have almost managed to forget that there used to be a time when I wrote poetry.”
“The subject matter of a poem can be traced back to some dim thought in the mind. While painting, the process adopted by me is quite the reverse. First, there is the hint of a line, then the line becomes a form. This creation of form is an endless wonder. If I were a finished artist, I’d probably have followed a preconceived idea in making a picture. But it is far more exciting when the mind is seized by something outside of it, some compulsive surprise element gradually assuming an understandable form.”