Monday, September 2, 2019

Artist of the day, September 2: Gaganendranath Tagore, an Indian painter (#787)

Gaganendranath Tagore (1867-1938), one of the brilliant artists and cultural activists of his time was unabashedly open to various kinds of artistic influences and sources throughout his life. Following the chronological sequence it is evident that Tagore moved with great élan from one mode of pictorial style to another in different phases of his career eschewing any singular stylistic consistency but exploring a range of variables cutting across culture and time.

The specific contexts of his art at various points of time also provided him with the necessary logic for each stylistic framework. Despite a certain kind of continuity in the early phase when he was producing the portraits and figure sketches with commendable accuracy or the Puri landscapes, or even the Chaitanya series  and illustrations for Jeevansmriti, he was clearly responding to diverse stylistic sources like Japanese brush techniques, wash paintings, sumi-e (black ink method) and possibly Chinese ink paintings as well. The variations in brushwork attempted by him in his political cartoons at the cost of contrived elegance are also a testimony to his penchant for sourcing and consequently appropriating techniques in spite of highly empirical and local subject matters.

Similarly, the so-called Cubist phase is one such group of paintings done during the period from 1921 to 1925 leading to a highly complex and personal imageries of the late paintings before he was unfortunately debilitated by cerebral paralysis.

© 2019. All content on this blog is protected by international copyright laws All images are copyrighted © by Gaganendranath Tagore or assignee. Apart from fair dealing for the purpose of private study, research, criticism or review as permitted under the Copyright Act, the use of any image from this site is prohibited unless prior written permission is obtained. All images used for illustrative purposes only



Mr Gaganendranath Tagore

Artist Studio at Jorasanko House

1907, Fairy in the Moon Light

1910, Untitled

1912 The crow

1915 Pratima Visarjan

1917, Cubist study: a crowded street scene

1920 city in the night

1920 Island of Birds

1920 Sunrise from Tiger Hill

1920, Movement

1920, Resurrection

1920, Untitled

1921, Untitled

1922 bed of arrows

1922 Composition

1922 Demonstrating new apparatus

1924, Interior with Figures

1925 Dwarkapuri

1925 Magician

1925 Meeting at the Staircase

1925 Swarnapuri Dwarka

1925, City in the night

1925, Resurrection

1925, Untitled

Christ in the Church (Unknown date)

Gaganendra (Unknown date)

Himalayan Bride (Unknown date)
Madane Theatre by Night (Unknown date)

O Master (Unknown date)

Pilgrims in front of Puri temple (Unknown date)

Portrait of William Rothenstein (Unknown date)

Puri Temples (Unknown date)

Story Teller (Unknown date)

Summer Night (Unknown date)

The Blue Mountain (Unknown date)

No comments:

Post a Comment