Important Notice

Born and brought up in erstwhile Bengal, now Bangladesh, Jogen Chowdhury rejected the stylistic traditions of the Bengal School of painting soon after he began his career as an artist. Believing that the academic style of representation of Bengal School artists like Hemendranath Mazumdar conveyed heavy bourgeois leanings, Chowdhury looked instead to the Indian family and its folklore for inspiration. His figures, rendered freely and often... Born and brought up in erstwhile Bengal, now Bangladesh, Jogen Chowdhury rejected the stylistic traditions of the Bengal School of painting soon after he began his career as an artist. Believing that the academic style of representation of Bengal School artists like Hemendranath Mazumdar conveyed heavy bourgeois leanings, Chowdhury looked instead to the Indian family and its folklore for inspiration. His figures, rendered freely and often distortedly, thus recall the people of his everyday encounters – from Bengali housewives and their husbands to the politicians and businessmen on the streets of Delhi – delivered with a mythical lyricism that lifts them from their mundane lives.

In the present lot, the artist, inspired by the year he spent at the Weavers’ Service Center in Madras designing decorative fabrics, fills almost the entire frame with the portrait of a woman in an elaborately patterned sari. The subject’s voluminous, yet fluid form is contained by the strong line that is Chowdhury’s trademark. Rejecting Romanticism, the artist instead uses his unique idiom of distortion to help his figures and his viewers transcend the ordinariness and the predictability of their existence, and to offer expression to the emotions they would otherwise keep hidden. Chowdhury’s portrayal also accommodates his consciousness of the different way in which Indian men and women sit and move – something he terms “the reality of the Indian form” (as quoted in R. Siva Kumar, Jogen Chowdhury – Enigmatic Visions, Glenbarra Art Museum, Himeji, 2005, p. 91). As the artist’s critic and biographer R. Siva Kumar explains, “Disproportion is the essence of Jogen’s bodies, the sign of their naturalness…In them disproportion is expression, never deformation.” Particularly with the women he portrays, this distortion is only “external”, enhancing the “reverence and sympathy” the artist feels for their situation (Ibid., p. 9, 86).

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