Jogen Chowdhury, the painter whose dense webs of cross-hatched ink gave Indian modern art some of its most unsettling and tender human figures, died on Sunday morning at Ruby General Hospital in Kolkata. He was 87.
Chowdhury, who also served a term in the Rajya Sabha for the Trinamool Congress, leaves behind a body of work spanning more than six decades and a generation of students at Santiniketan’s Kala Bhavana.
A line that never broke
Chowdhury was, above all, a draughtsman. Collectors and critics often called him the master of the unbroken line: a single sinuous contour that wraps a figure from head to foot, swelling and sagging as it goes. Inside that outline he built volume not with brushwork but with thousands of fine, criss-crossing ink strokes.
He took up this minute cross-hatching in the 1960s, often in black ink on cheap paper and newsprint. He once explained that it let him build a surface quality “that wouldn’t be possible with watercolour and brush.” Over time he let thin washes of pastel or watercolour seep into the hatched ground, so colour seems to rise from inside the form rather than sit on top of it.
The figures themselves are what viewers remember. His men and women are soft, bulging and deliberately distorted : swollen hands and feet, drooping bellies, heads that seem too heavy for their necks. The distortion carries a hint of caricature, but rarely cruelty. Critic R. Siva Kumar wrote of how Chowdhury cross-wired the feel of cloth, bolsters, sofas and skin, so that bodies seem to slump like cushions and cushions seem to breathe like bodies, giving his pictures both a sensual ripeness and a quiet unease.
His subjects were drawn from ordinary life: couples in bed, a man dozing in a chair, a woman lost in thought, flowers, fish, animals. Works such as Night of the Honeymoon (1975) and Day Dreaming (1996) turned private moments into studies of intimacy and distance. Yet the work also carried politics. Tiger in Moonlit Night has long been read as a comment on the Emergency, which he lived through as a curator at the President’s residence. Many critics trace the bruised, displaced quality of his faces back to the upheaval of Partition, which uprooted his family when he was a boy.
His style kept moving. The Delhi years of the 1970s and early 1980s produced his most densely hatched, sculptural figures. After he moved to Santiniketan in 1987, the hatching thinned and the line grew bolder and freer, with simpler compositions. He worked across ink, pastel, watercolour, charcoal, oil and printmaking, and he was also a published poet.
From Faridpur to Santiniketan
Chowdhury was born on February 19, 1939, in Daharpara village in Faridpur, now in Bangladesh. Both parents drew: his father, a zamindar, painted mythological scenes for village theatre and sculpted deities, and his mother was skilled at alpana floor designs. After Partition the family came to Calcutta in 1948 as refugees, settling in a colony in Dhakuria in 1951.
He studied at the Government College of Art & Craft in Calcutta from 1955 to 1960, then taught art at Howrah Zilla School and worked as a textile designer for the Handloom Board. In 1965 a scholarship took him to Paris, where he studied at the École des Beaux-Arts and printmaking at Atelier 17. He won the Prix le France de la Jeune Peinture in 1966 and returned to India in 1968 with the individual style he would refine for the rest of his life.
In 1972 he left a design job in Madras to become curator of the art collection at Rashtrapati Bhavan in New Delhi, a post he held for 15 years. There he co-founded Gallery 26 and helped shape the capital’s art scene. In 1987 he joined Kala Bhavana at Visva-Bharati, Santiniketan, as professor of painting, later serving as principal and professor emeritus. In 2014 he returned to Rashtrapati Bhavan as its first artist-in-residence.
The same year he entered the Rajya Sabha from West Bengal on a Trinamool Congress ticket, serving from 2014 to 2020. His honours included the Kalidas Samman (2001), the West Bengal government’s Banga Bibhushan (2012) and Dhaka University’s Zainul Samman (2016), along with a major retrospective at the National Gallery of Modern Art in Bengaluru in 2016.
Legacy
Chowdhury belonged to the generation that gave post-Independence Indian art a figurative language of its own, rooted in Bengal but not bound by the Santiniketan or Bengal School traditions he inherited.
His pictures hang in the Rashtrapati Bhavan collection and the National Gallery of Modern Art, and they remain fixtures of Indian art auctions. News of his death prompted an outpouring of grief across Bengal’s art world on Sunday. Details of his funeral had not been announced at the time of writing.
To know his works deeply read more on Abir Pothi: Jogen Chowdhury: Memoirs of an Indian Dream and Alchemy of Expression
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