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拍品专文
Looking beyond the typical styles of his predecessors from the Bengal School, Jogen Chowdhury chose folkloric aspects of Indian culture and popular artistic traditions like Kalighat painting as sources of inspiration, developing a unique and immediately recognisable artistic idiom. Characterized by oddly fluid, amoeba-like figures, intricate cross-hatching and highly fetishised surfaces, Chowdhury’s figuration draws equally from the natural and the psychological. His works document contemporary human relationships and experiences drawing on elements of traditional imagery with a seemingly effortless interplay of boldness and fragility, violence and beauty.
Chowdhury moved to Calcutta in 1947 from a small town in the Faridpur district of what is now Bangladesh, following the partition of the subcontinent. He graduated from the Government College of Arts and Crafts, Calcutta, in 1960 and studied in Paris from 1965-68, first at the École des Beaux Arts then at the legendary print studio, Atelier 17, founded by Stanley William Hayter.
After returning to India from his studies in Paris in the mid-1960s, the artist found work as a textile designer in Madras, and then moved to Delhi in 1972. During his time in the capital, Chowdhury developed what has come to be known as his signature style of figuration. His highly-detailed works on paper are executed in ink and pastel, their figures and objects set against pitch black backgrounds. The emphasis was on strong, sinuous lines, and Chowdhury used a distinctive crosshatching technique within these lines to achieve tonal variations, volume, texture and movement. The artist’s remarkable draughtsmanship reflects his work with textiles, where repetition, patterning and direction were paramount.
Reviewing the artist’s work in 1976, the critic Richard Bartholomew notes that “his drawings are remarkable for their economy of means and directness of purpose. The outline does not embellish the figure but delineates it. The structure of the body and the folds of the flesh forming a substantial image modelled only slightly with firm, sure hatching-in lines of coloured ink” (R. Bartholomew, ‘Mixed Group of Bengal Artists’, Times of India, 6 April 1976). Beyond mere portraiture, the artist’s memorable figuration voices social and political critique, and reveals his deep understanding of the human condition.
In lot 81, Chowdhury uses this technique to portray Lord Ganesha, also known as Ganapati. Much like his human figures, here the subject’s disproportionate, corpulent figure is carefully constructed from fine crosshatched lines, appearing to heave and sag like a shapeshifting amoeba. A caricature of the popular deity’s typical depictions and antithetical to his divine associations, Chowdhury’s version, sitting cross-legged with four fleshy arms and a furrowed brow, is aimed at parodying India’s elite and business classes. As the artist noted, “the image of Ganesha has always aroused my curiosity, with its strange comicality [...] when I painted a naked Ganesha as a satiric representation of a business community [...] there were obviously two motives at play – to belittle him as a representative of businessmen and to revel in pure fun. I had, of course, turned my back on the supposed valorization of faith in the icon. I was thus taking a social position beyond my private space” (Artist statement, Jogen Chowdhury, Shadow Lines: Tracing the Journey, Kolkata, 2023, p. 390).
Chowdhury’s unique interpretation of form is “simplified, as if through x-ray vision: attenuated, exaggerated, fragmented, reconfigured and rephrased, thus intensifying its visual and conceptual expression. For Chowdhury, the body has to communicate in silence. Often placing it against a dark, vacant background, he does not appropriate the specificities of place or environment; instead he transfers feelings of anguish on to the solitary figure through his gestural mark-making. His deep, dense crosshatched lines simulate body hair and a web of veins take away the smooth sensuality of the classical body to manifest the textures of life.” (K. Singh, India Modern: Narratives from 20th Century Indian Art, New Delhi, 2015, p. 129)
In lot 82, an early painting of a large butterfly with almost psychedelic patterning hovering over a row of diminutive flowers, “Jogen responds warmly to the misshapen magic or organic forms and surfaces, in a spirit that partakes of the Japanese wabi-sabi aesthetic of irregularity and desuetude as well as an Indian aesthetic of rang, emphasizing the saturations of expressive mood and atmosphere. Such fluidity also characterizes the states of consciousness that Jogen Chowdhury’s tableaux convey: the perennial cycle, at once enigmatic and replenishing, of dream, reverie, revelation and rapture” (R. Hoskote, Jogen Chowdhury, Reverie and Reality, Kolkata, 2021, p. 14).
Chowdhury moved to Calcutta in 1947 from a small town in the Faridpur district of what is now Bangladesh, following the partition of the subcontinent. He graduated from the Government College of Arts and Crafts, Calcutta, in 1960 and studied in Paris from 1965-68, first at the École des Beaux Arts then at the legendary print studio, Atelier 17, founded by Stanley William Hayter.
After returning to India from his studies in Paris in the mid-1960s, the artist found work as a textile designer in Madras, and then moved to Delhi in 1972. During his time in the capital, Chowdhury developed what has come to be known as his signature style of figuration. His highly-detailed works on paper are executed in ink and pastel, their figures and objects set against pitch black backgrounds. The emphasis was on strong, sinuous lines, and Chowdhury used a distinctive crosshatching technique within these lines to achieve tonal variations, volume, texture and movement. The artist’s remarkable draughtsmanship reflects his work with textiles, where repetition, patterning and direction were paramount.
Reviewing the artist’s work in 1976, the critic Richard Bartholomew notes that “his drawings are remarkable for their economy of means and directness of purpose. The outline does not embellish the figure but delineates it. The structure of the body and the folds of the flesh forming a substantial image modelled only slightly with firm, sure hatching-in lines of coloured ink” (R. Bartholomew, ‘Mixed Group of Bengal Artists’, Times of India, 6 April 1976). Beyond mere portraiture, the artist’s memorable figuration voices social and political critique, and reveals his deep understanding of the human condition.
In lot 81, Chowdhury uses this technique to portray Lord Ganesha, also known as Ganapati. Much like his human figures, here the subject’s disproportionate, corpulent figure is carefully constructed from fine crosshatched lines, appearing to heave and sag like a shapeshifting amoeba. A caricature of the popular deity’s typical depictions and antithetical to his divine associations, Chowdhury’s version, sitting cross-legged with four fleshy arms and a furrowed brow, is aimed at parodying India’s elite and business classes. As the artist noted, “the image of Ganesha has always aroused my curiosity, with its strange comicality [...] when I painted a naked Ganesha as a satiric representation of a business community [...] there were obviously two motives at play – to belittle him as a representative of businessmen and to revel in pure fun. I had, of course, turned my back on the supposed valorization of faith in the icon. I was thus taking a social position beyond my private space” (Artist statement, Jogen Chowdhury, Shadow Lines: Tracing the Journey, Kolkata, 2023, p. 390).
Chowdhury’s unique interpretation of form is “simplified, as if through x-ray vision: attenuated, exaggerated, fragmented, reconfigured and rephrased, thus intensifying its visual and conceptual expression. For Chowdhury, the body has to communicate in silence. Often placing it against a dark, vacant background, he does not appropriate the specificities of place or environment; instead he transfers feelings of anguish on to the solitary figure through his gestural mark-making. His deep, dense crosshatched lines simulate body hair and a web of veins take away the smooth sensuality of the classical body to manifest the textures of life.” (K. Singh, India Modern: Narratives from 20th Century Indian Art, New Delhi, 2015, p. 129)
In lot 82, an early painting of a large butterfly with almost psychedelic patterning hovering over a row of diminutive flowers, “Jogen responds warmly to the misshapen magic or organic forms and surfaces, in a spirit that partakes of the Japanese wabi-sabi aesthetic of irregularity and desuetude as well as an Indian aesthetic of rang, emphasizing the saturations of expressive mood and atmosphere. Such fluidity also characterizes the states of consciousness that Jogen Chowdhury’s tableaux convey: the perennial cycle, at once enigmatic and replenishing, of dream, reverie, revelation and rapture” (R. Hoskote, Jogen Chowdhury, Reverie and Reality, Kolkata, 2021, p. 14).