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Lot Essay
Looking beyond the styles typical 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 recognizable artistic idiom. Characterized by oddly fluid, amoeba-like figures, intricate cross-hatching and highly decorative 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, Chowdhury worked as a textile designer in Madras until he moved to Delhi in 1972.
Boats and Shadowed Rainbow and Other Stories is a seminal work in the artist’s oeuvre. One of only a handful of vivid, large-format canvases the artist painted, this monumental painting highlights Chowdhury’s powerful aesthetic and acute powers of observation and documentation of particular human experiences. Having witnessed the aftermath of the partition first hand, as his family relocated from East to West Bengal, this painting offers unparalleled testimony of history in the making, directly referencing life in the refugee camps that resulted from this mass exodus, an experience Chowdhury recalls vividly. “When we came over to Kolkata after India’s Independence in 1947, we were completely cut off from our previous life in eastern Bengal. We were still living in a village at the time of World War II and even though we did experience faint repercussions of the war such as the famine that came in its wake which took a toll on life in Bengal, we were spared its real impact. However, the communal riots between Hindus and Muslims which we saw after arriving in West Bengal, was the first experience to cast a dark spell on our minds and thoughts…Our life was in turmoil after the Partition. Our dream of a peaceful settlement was shattered. Even though I have come a long way since then, at times those childhood memories still haunt me.” (Artist statement, S. Das, ‘Partition, poverty, politics: What shaped master painter Jogen Chowdhury’s art’, Hindustan Times, 9 June 2016, accessed January 2019)
In a composition that deliberately transcends conventional rules of perspective, the artist depicts three figures surrounded by floating objects and symbols, including a crescent moon, a rainbow, two small boats drifting on multicolored fabric-like streams, a flower, some household pots and a butterfly. Chowdhury manages to unify these diverse elements in this dreamlike diorama by portraying the figures either sleeping or in deep contemplation. Frozen in limbo between the past and future, between memory and reality, and between desire and anxiety, each object around them becomes loaded with meaning, representing various aspects of their memories and aspirations. In this composition, Chowdhury thus poetically memorializes the experience of refugees fleeing their homelands for unknown futures, by means of the images, possessions, memories and landscapes that they hold dearest. The ominously red and blue river, with one male figure on either side, perhaps represents the Ganges, a river that flows in both East and West Bengal. Although the contemplative female figure appears to have her head under a storm cloud, a rainbow hovers above it, symbolic perhaps of hope at the end of a long storm.
“Chowdhury's seemingly out of control outlines, that enclose mottled areas of moldering flesh etched in a spidery network of cross-hatched lines, and his bodies that bloat and sag as if some genetic code within them had gone mad, are not images that are easy to forget.” (K. Kapoor, Contemporary Art - Deutsche Bank Bombay, Ahmedabad, 1995, p. 16) More than mere portraiture, the artist’s memorable figuration voices social and political critique, and reveals his deep understanding of the human condition and the mechanisms of memory. His experience with textile design is also evident in the delicacy of the lines and the details of the fabrics in this painting, intricately decorated with floral motifs.
Chowdhury has exhibited his works in several solo shows in India and internationally, including Singapore, Amsterdam, and Berlin. In 1966, the artist was awarded the Prix de la Jeune Peinture in Paris, and, in 1986, he received an award at the Second Biennale of Havana, Cuba. He was presented the prestigious Kalidas Sanman by the Government of Madhya Pradesh in 2001. The artist lives and works in Santiniketan.
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, Chowdhury worked as a textile designer in Madras until he moved to Delhi in 1972.
Boats and Shadowed Rainbow and Other Stories is a seminal work in the artist’s oeuvre. One of only a handful of vivid, large-format canvases the artist painted, this monumental painting highlights Chowdhury’s powerful aesthetic and acute powers of observation and documentation of particular human experiences. Having witnessed the aftermath of the partition first hand, as his family relocated from East to West Bengal, this painting offers unparalleled testimony of history in the making, directly referencing life in the refugee camps that resulted from this mass exodus, an experience Chowdhury recalls vividly. “When we came over to Kolkata after India’s Independence in 1947, we were completely cut off from our previous life in eastern Bengal. We were still living in a village at the time of World War II and even though we did experience faint repercussions of the war such as the famine that came in its wake which took a toll on life in Bengal, we were spared its real impact. However, the communal riots between Hindus and Muslims which we saw after arriving in West Bengal, was the first experience to cast a dark spell on our minds and thoughts…Our life was in turmoil after the Partition. Our dream of a peaceful settlement was shattered. Even though I have come a long way since then, at times those childhood memories still haunt me.” (Artist statement, S. Das, ‘Partition, poverty, politics: What shaped master painter Jogen Chowdhury’s art’, Hindustan Times, 9 June 2016, accessed January 2019)
In a composition that deliberately transcends conventional rules of perspective, the artist depicts three figures surrounded by floating objects and symbols, including a crescent moon, a rainbow, two small boats drifting on multicolored fabric-like streams, a flower, some household pots and a butterfly. Chowdhury manages to unify these diverse elements in this dreamlike diorama by portraying the figures either sleeping or in deep contemplation. Frozen in limbo between the past and future, between memory and reality, and between desire and anxiety, each object around them becomes loaded with meaning, representing various aspects of their memories and aspirations. In this composition, Chowdhury thus poetically memorializes the experience of refugees fleeing their homelands for unknown futures, by means of the images, possessions, memories and landscapes that they hold dearest. The ominously red and blue river, with one male figure on either side, perhaps represents the Ganges, a river that flows in both East and West Bengal. Although the contemplative female figure appears to have her head under a storm cloud, a rainbow hovers above it, symbolic perhaps of hope at the end of a long storm.
“Chowdhury's seemingly out of control outlines, that enclose mottled areas of moldering flesh etched in a spidery network of cross-hatched lines, and his bodies that bloat and sag as if some genetic code within them had gone mad, are not images that are easy to forget.” (K. Kapoor, Contemporary Art - Deutsche Bank Bombay, Ahmedabad, 1995, p. 16) More than mere portraiture, the artist’s memorable figuration voices social and political critique, and reveals his deep understanding of the human condition and the mechanisms of memory. His experience with textile design is also evident in the delicacy of the lines and the details of the fabrics in this painting, intricately decorated with floral motifs.
Chowdhury has exhibited his works in several solo shows in India and internationally, including Singapore, Amsterdam, and Berlin. In 1966, the artist was awarded the Prix de la Jeune Peinture in Paris, and, in 1986, he received an award at the Second Biennale of Havana, Cuba. He was presented the prestigious Kalidas Sanman by the Government of Madhya Pradesh in 2001. The artist lives and works in Santiniketan.