Rustic Rhythms

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Rustic Rhythms

Tuesday, 25 January 2022 | Uma Nair

Rustic Rhythms

RABINDRANATH TAGORE felt that painting was closer to nature, as compared to any other art form, and could be universally understood, says Uma Nair

Rabindranath Tagore, was not just the Nobel laureate poet, author, thinker, composer, but he was also a self-taught artist. This Republic Day it is good to ponder on his brilliance as an aesthetician of Indian heritage and experience. According to Christie’s, New York, his volume of poems, Gitanjali, established his international reputation when it was published in London in 1912 in his own English translation, and the following year Tagore became the first non-European to win the Nobel Prize in Literature.

As a result, he became a literary celebrity and frequently toured Europe and America. His flowing robes and long white hair and beard conformed to the common western conception of an Indian sage and his lectures attracted huge audiences. Jacob Epstein, who sculpted a striking bust of him in 1926, reported that, ‘he carried no money and was conducted about like a holy man’.

Tagore turned to painting later in his life. By the time his first exhibition of paintings and drawings at the Galerie Pigalle, Paris in 1930, Tagore, at the age of 69, had been recognised as one of the greatest writers who had ever lived. He had an early inclination toward representational art but had given up hope of being a professional painter around 1900. Over the years, Tagore maintained private journals where he continued to doodle and sketch. Then almost suddenly, in 1924, while in Argentina as Victoria Ocampo's guest, his doodles assumed more elaborate and expressive intent.

Ocampo recognised Tagore's talent and found spiritualism in his images of prehistoric monsters, birds and faces as they were much more than naturalistic interpretations. Compared to his early doodles, these were not entirely spontaneous but inspired by his interest in anthropology and the examples of both primitive and modern art he had seen.

The world Tagore revealed in his best works was one of self-reflexive evolution, where the images themselves were in the process of taking shape, as was his art. His early paintings were rendered mainly in monochrome, followed by two-toned and three-toned drawings. The pen-point brush was often used laterally, fingers and bits of rag spread the inks and the brush was the last to be adopted.

It is heads and figures executed by Tagore in a variety of styles, that have elicited the most interest. Restrained yet restless, suggestive, bizarre and haunting, these portraits are considered to be among his most memorable works. ‘The pensive ovoid face of a woman with large unwavering, soulful eyes was perhaps his most obsessive theme. Exhibited first in 1930, endless variations of the same mood-image continued to emerge throughout. The earlier ones were delicately modelled and opalescent, while the latter examples were excessively dramatic with intensely lit forehead, exaggerated nose-ridge, painted in strong colours, bodied forth from a primal gloom.’ (Robinson, The Art of Rabindranath Tagore, Calcutta, 1989, p. 56.)

These influences on Tagore evolved over his lifetime and emerged as expressions of innovation and modernity through his paintings which were unlike anything being produced by Indian artists at the time. In the present works, the woodcut Namaz and the Untitled, Tagore suppressed physical detail, creating basic curvilinear forms. The body is represented as a solid field of colour with strokes. Scholars say he had a natural inclination toward the tenets of what we now understand as primitivism in modern art; the search for symbols and meaning in visual forms borrowed from non-Western, pre-historic and rural traditions and people. So, we glimpse rural regeneration in the rustic rhythms.

Painting allowed Tagore to break away from the limitations of language. He felt that painting, unlike any other art form, was closer to nature and could be universally understood and shared.

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