Talking about the glorious works of Rabindranath Tagore always inspires us to be at our best. Surprisingly, age is just a number, was best proved by Rabo when he started his career in art in his 60s because some of his writings couldn’t express those emotions, which he displayed the best on canvas. A Nobel Prize winner in 1913, he belonged to an affluent family in Bengal with an acute sensibility toward literature, poetry, social reforms, dance, and music. Rabo was a multi-faceted personality who had no training in art but left 2500 pieces of artwork in his last 15 years due to his extraordinary imaginative spontaneity of the visual library. The stories about his early life and the poems he wrote convey the impression that there is a deep understanding of the artist’s views on life in his artwork. The article intends to share the inspiration, style, and information about Rabindranath Tagore paintings.
Who Was Rabindranath Tagore?
One of India’s greatest poets and the first non-European to receive the Nobel Prize for literature, Tagore is one of the best-known world figures who had numerous admirers, including Wilfred Owen, Andre Gibe, and Albert Einstein. An avowed cosmopolitan, Tagore took around twelve world tours to challenge the colonial representation of India as an inferior subject nation. Tagore, who had a powerful impact on modernism, was also an influential educationist and founder of the holistic experimental university in Bengal. Essentially known for his writings and poems, art critics continuously compared his poems to his paintings and found the latter more connective, expressive, and mesmerizing. Tagore only took painting later in his life when he was unsatisfied with his poems and writings as he didn’t find them very expressive.
| Artist | Rabindranath Tagore |
| Birth | 7 May, 1861 |
| Death | 7 August, 1941 |
| Period | Modern India |
| Medium | Watercolor |
A Brief Account of Rabo’s Art Style.
The story of Rabindranath’s painting started long back when he used to encourage his brothers Abanindranath and Gagendranath to make their best contributions, and he doodled freely through his pen. From his early works, we see that his manuscripts bear simple and amble designs or testimonies of his doodling. When we check the inspiration behind his work, it is due to the severities he suffered in his life. When he was young, he lost his mother, and then the only female bond in his early life, his beloved friend and sister-in-law Kadambari Devi, abruptly took her life at the age of 22, causing further misery to him. In 1902-1907, he lost his wife, daughter, and youngest son. The bleak emotional state of loneliness and the passing away of his loved ones are articulated in his works like Mahua and Purabi.
Furthermore, we will see that in his mature years of painting art, he achieved an individual style of expressionism, similar to European Modernism, which brought modernity to Indian art. Rabindranath Tagore paintings display his immense allurement towards Primitive and Japanese art. The specialty of work in his artwork remains in their expressions, handling of lines, and aberrant color uses, other than red and green. There is an absorbing fact about his paintings,
“his doodling is like the lyrics of his literary poems that say something meaningful about spiritualism and embrace the materialistic world. In Europe, his artworks are seen as mystic and have a spiritual meaning.”
Unlike Amrita’ Sher-Gil’s paintings, which solely displayed Indian peasants, Tagore’s primitivist paintings were more about inner subjectivity. Through his paintings, he renounced his love for illusionism in favor of avant-garde art. Rabo never painted in his earlier life, but he did take some drawing lessons in his youth. Though he didn’t paint as a younger self, there is a sketch of his wife from 1880. In the 1870s, while Rabindranath Tagore was in Paris, he expressed an admiration for an academic nude by a fashionable French painter, Carolus Duran. Though he took a lively interest in art, he always felt bashful about taking art seriously in his own career.
One of the dramatic aversion to modernism was first noted in 1924 when an Argentinian writer, Victoria Ocampo, was nursing Tagore in her villa in Buenos Aires, and she had a chance to see his notebook where he doodled by joining the crossed-over texts. As she saw his radical imaginative images, she instantly contacted Georges-Henri Riviere, Curator of the Trocadero Museum in Paris. Riviere knew ‘primitive art’ and its importance, which is why they arranged a show of Rabindranath Tagore paintings. The exhibition opened on 2 May 1930 at the Galerie du Theatre Pigalle, alongside the exhibition of African and Oceanic art. This exhibition consisted of paintings portraying faces, lovers, animals, landscapes, and imaginary architecture. There were great reviews of this exhibition, generally complimentary, as these artworks revealed a rich imagination and a hitherto unknown facet of the poet’s personality. Henri Bidou gave the most penetrating analysis of his artworks by contrasting them with mimetic poetry, which finds a remarkable convergence of spirit between him and European modernists. Furthermore, a short essay was published in The Modern Review in Calcutta in 1917 on his drawings.
However, when Rabindranath Tagore paintings were exhibited in various British cities, these artworks were cold-shouldered by English critics as there were paintings of the infamous Amritsar massacre. The only exception as a critic was the artist Joseph Southall in Birmingham who described that Tagore’s lack of conventional art training gave such exceptional strength to his compositions that people saw the unexpected. Then, the Birmingham Mail expressed his conventional art as ‘a marvelous example of the sense of balance and harmony, even in the most fortuitous of its forms.’
The Story of Doodling of Rabindranath Tagore.
So far, you might have noticed that I have used the term Doodling again and again and that the people were especially impressed with them. But what was so special about Rabo’s Doodles?
There is a strange virality in his pictures, which is far superior to the effeminate oriental art as they consist ‘stream of consciousness.’ Between 1915 and 1924, Tagore’s artistic taste saw a change as the drawings were symbolically renounced, and it was all an act of self-expression rather than just a correct representation of the visual world.
Started from just the marginal doodles in 1887 when he wrote poems, it was his independent efforts of drawing and textual corrections that began as an art of doodling. In one of his early manuscripts, he linked the writing that was to be deleted to form a bold block form. The crossed-out words, which scattered across the page, were turned into ornamental shapes and inked by the meandering tendrils. From 1905-1923, these examples of textual corrections into images were occasional, but there were some linked corrections, which looked like creepers climbing or cascading across the page. Amongst them, some others looked like a network of lakes and waterways mapped across the text’s body. They had an organic rhythm in them, which invoked a vegetal association, while others had a geometric contour or movements shaped in a smithy.
These doodles were not incidental as they happened to be in the manuscripts of the poems to create a rhythmic sense that pervades poetry and greater structural freedom of poetry, further transforming the corrections into rhythmic visual configurations.
In later manuscripts, this tended to reverse as the images at times dominated and nearly wiped out the texts. With this reversal of the relationship,
“the text now becomes islands of words floating in a dark sea of entangled lines, or spots of light filtering through a thicket of ambivalence.”
These pictures suggested two contrasting relationships- sisterhood and opposition between words and images. Some of the later doodles from 1937 to 40 consist of texts submerged into the doodles as if these were flowing water with hints of texts.
One of the most significant points to understand here is that Tagore never copied any motifs, instead, used his visual imagination from the minutest detailing of his surroundings to make these doodles. The motive was self-expression. The only exception here was his ‘nude woman riding a flying monster,’ which has a little familiarity with McKnight Kauffer’s poster, The Early Bird, seen in the underground stations of London.
8 Rabindranath Tagore Paintings.
1. Bird Fantastic.
Rabo was always close to nature and a great observant of it, or you could say that it had quick and meaningful conversations with him. Carrying this pot of knowledge, we know that his first art was doodling. Now, most of his doodles represent animals, but we do not know whether they exist in reality. He describes it as,
“a probable animal that had unaccountably missed its chance of existence or a bird that only can sour in our dreams.”
Here, in this painting, we see the detailed careful handling of lines with a representation of a living animal movement on an imaginary body. The portrait has an intense psychological effect with a complex vision. The rhythms of lines and their movement are breathtaking with the careful use of aberrant color. The quest for this rhythm of lines is the dominating character of Chinese and Japanese art, which has a dynamic motion and a solitary stillness. If you see them more closely, you crave the intensity of focus to understand them. Throughout the Universe, numerous tiny particles collide to produce energy and form entities by compressing. This cosmos-making is visible here in this artwork through simple but intense colors.
The painting speaks of the ‘inner rhythm of the soul,’ which Jugendstil artist Adolf Holzel emphasized in his artworks. Like him, Tagore also possessed the quality of “linear expressive movement” in his compositions. Being a poet and composer of songs and dance dramas, Tagore had a great knowledge of rhythm, describing the entire universe as an ‘endless rhythm of lines and colors.’ Hence, this painting speaks of rhythm and lines to give itself a representation of an idea or a fact.
2. Landscape.
Having grown up on his family’s farm, he experienced childhood memories filled with the wonders of nature. When he laid these memories on paper, they took an art form, connecting and feeling like a world drowned in the shining sky of the evening sunlight. In those peaceful conversations with nature, he resembled the longing for companionship and his gloomy days filled with solitude. Therefore, his landscape paintings display the serene silence behind the colors. They remark on the geometrical flatness that has the least to modulate with color tones.
There is a stronger feeling of humanity in every landscape painting he creates. In his last phase of life, visual art embeds the new identity of color, shapes, and lines. It is also visible that he did not create the first sketches or preparatory drawings; instead, he directly laid everything down with his brush strokes on paper.
The intermixing skies of orange and blue that represent the arrival of the night after shining dawn with the colorful shades of trees and waters: is mesmerizing. This Rabindranath Tagore’s painting is made for those who find the usual peace and serenity in nature and those who have deep conversations with it.
3. Dancing Woman.
Rabo was a social reformer who believed in the freedom of women. He observed throughout his life that in India; a woman had the status of a goddess, but he never drew portraits carrying the same feeling. Why? In one of the songs, Keno Cheye Aachho Go Ma (Why Are You Staring, o, Mother), he showed the agony and misery of these devis or women. A woman’s identity is often determined by her marital status, virginity, ethnicity, and race, but is it really about her? Rabindranath Tagore drew women in bold, dreamy, asexual, who stare at us in agony, needing more attention. The status of women is that they are treated like objects who must do everything they can in support of their families and husbands. She can’t live on her terms and is depressed by the patriarchial society, targeting the circles of social evils. Here, the artist wanted to depict the beautiful woman dancing freely in her virtual world, breaking all the boundaries and setting herself free from every misery. The bold look of the lady in the attire is an expression of freedom and love for herself. Rabindranath Tagore paintings emphasize the dark veils behind the woman’s misery.
4. Woman’s Face.
Rabindranath Tagore’s fascination for the beautiful and unusual expression of faces is observed through his portraiture that often resembles a mask. Throughout his travels to Bali, Indonesia, and Japan, the cultural interchange inspired him to draw these faces. They often resemble the feeling of humor, sorrow, anger, fear, wit, dreams, and a smile.
Here in this artwork, the innocent and gloomy eyes show her miserable condition and inability to express herself. Furthermore, she drapes herself with a sari that indicates the Bengali attire of the woman. The melancholic face reveals the sufferings she had with the pain ceased.
5. Head Study (Geometric).
From the sketch, Rabo painted consistent lines witnessing a dramatic twist in the figure. The sharp nose with the blind eyes and the head consisting of various shapes and figures are bearing witness to the memories. The demise of his loved ones left a mark in the form of those painful memories, which he consisted in his head. The black ink with the hues of black shades in the dark moments in life, this Rabindranath Tagore’s painting is a masterpiece that details the human brain consisting of all those moments of love, peace, anxiety, agony, and despair.
6. Untitled.
Rabindranath Tagore paintings took a turn when he discovered the ritual masks, totemic animals, face scars, and body tattoos of Native Americans. The face as a mask was one of the most obsessive images from Rabindranath’s gallery, which is why his dark portraits are must-visit. There is a possibility that he might have encountered the primitive masks at the Trocadero while he was in Paris in 1872. However, he painted these paintings only in the later phase of his artistic life. This painting shows a lady with gloomy eyes with a black cloth covering her head in the red background. There is a possibility that this painting is of Kadamba Devi, whose suicide left a void in his life. To me, she might be Kadamba Devi, who is grieving the loss of Rabindranath’s friendship, and the red color of the background might indicate her suicide.
Rabindranath turned the human face into a mask, cropping the ears and suppressing other details, thereby stressing the mask’s impassive character in a series of free portraits.
7. Death Scene.
One of the most impressive and powerful Rabindranath Tagore paintings, the Death Scene, represents a disturbing moment of the loss of a loved one. Rabindranath himself witnessed many deaths of his close ones, which is why he portrayed this pain and the shock of losing someone. Parth Mitter put an interesting note to these images by the artist, writing,
“Freud spoke of double entendres and ambiguities as offering access to the inner recess of our psyche. J.J. Spector, writing on Freud’s aesthetics, comments that apparitions, accidents, and distortions that reveal the ‘essence’ may not be psychoanalytically provable, but they can act as a spur of creativity.”
It is possible that the loss of loved ones may indulge in the creativity of the artist. This image, with a mood of alienation and anxiety, might be because of the depths of the psyche of the artist. In this painting, the woman who is in painful shock sits below the corpse as if she is shattered by witnessing the loss. However, a manly figure stands nearby her maybe to console or reflect the dark reality of society after the death of someone close.
8. Untitled (Two Faces).
The picture shows two faces- one that is evil and the other is scared, with a ghostly appearance. This image, by the use of primitive masks, shows an erotic encounter of the artist that connects the viewer to his fractured consciousness. There is a possibility that the artist painted his worst nightmares over the canvas as this picture has dark depths of identity. Two of the engrossing elements, which Tagore used again and again in his these dark paintings are unpredictability and dream imagery. The artist offered a Freudian explanation of the artistic process as a series of accidental discoveries, which is quite clear in this image.
Conclusion.
Somewhere I felt that it is rightly said by a few artists, including Amrita Sher-Gil, that Rabindranath’s poems are less innovative and expressive than his artworks. The later dark images of the artist create a disturbing momentum of the unexpected events, which I find most intriguing. Not only that, this expressionist art of Tagore rejects the narrow focus on just nationalist or cultural authenticity, which was common in the Bengal School. The use of primitivism and the philosophy of human faces as masks, central to Rabindranath Tagore paintings make them more exceptional and interesting. These pictures not only consist of deformed bodies or horrific emotions but they also have the power to create a relationship with the viewers through a primitivist non-representational mode. These paintings are not to explain but to express!
Resources.
- The Triumph of Modernism by Partha Mitter.
- Rabindrachitravali, Volume 1 by R Siva Kumar.
- Featured Image: Untitled (Four Faces) by Rabindranath Tagore; Tallenge Store.
Frequently Asked Questions.
Rabindranath Tagore was famous for his doodle artworks that showed expressionism. His paintings were inspired by the spiritual and materialistic world, making him a mystic figure in Europe.
The Bengali Polymath started painting in his 60s and left behind 2500 artworks. Tagore never used brushes and relied upon pen to make art. He used to give only a single seating to complete each painting.
Rabindranath Tagore started painting when he felt some of his writings couldn’t express the emotions that his artworks did. He painted 2500 paintings in the last 15 years of his life. His style was similar to European Modernism which brought modernity to Indian Art.
Rabindranath Tagore used contextual modernism to reshape Indian literature, music and art in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. His art forms were inspired by instances of his life and had a spiritual meaning.
Rabindranath Tagore is best known for his contribution to Indian literature, music and art. He was a man with many talents who won a Nobel Prize in Literature in 1913, making him the first non-European to win it.
Rabindranath Tagore held the first public and international exhibition of his paintings in Paris in 1930, at the Gallerie Pigalle.
Rabindranath Tagore learned painting by watching his nephews Abanindranath and Gaganendranath. During the last 15 years of his life, he doodled to express his emotions and brought modernity to Indian art.
Rabindranath Tagore wrote several famous poems, one of which also won a Nobel Prize in 1913. In his later life, he was also known for his contribution to Indian art as he made a total of 2500 artworks.
Rabindranath Tagore suffered from a partial color deficiency called Protanopia. Commonly referred to as blindness to red, Protanopia is a state where a person sees more green than red.
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