Important Notice

In 1968, when Jogen Chowdhury returned to India from Paris, he resolved to develop an artistic style that neither relied on Western techniques and conventions nor on Indian art traditions, but one that arose from personal experience. The present lot was painted in 1974, during a formative period in the artist’s career, and bears affinities in style and composition with his seminal Reminisces of a Dream series of works, which he began in... In 1968, when Jogen Chowdhury returned to India from Paris, he resolved to develop an artistic style that neither relied on Western techniques and conventions nor on Indian art traditions, but one that arose from personal experience. The present lot was painted in 1974, during a formative period in the artist’s career, and bears affinities in style and composition with his seminal Reminisces of a Dream series of works, which he began in 1969. Often featuring objects and elements that float, these canvases are imbued with a surreal, dream-like quality and are charged with tension and a hallucinatory effect.

The human figure is central to Chowdhury’s oeuvre, depicted with a mastery over form, contour, and line. The forms in the present lot acquire a sculpturesque quality through deep shading and skilful tonal variation, likely influenced by the artist’s training in academic realism at Calcutta’s Government School of Art and Craft. “...while his preferred idiom is the compelling black line-thick as a rope or cross-hatched like a net that will not allow the smallest nuance of emotion to escape-he has also opened his frames to tints of muted grey, chalky blue and ochre. In more festive or frenzied compositions, he even permits a tinge of pink or yellow.” (Ranjit Hoskote, “Line and Colour,” Jogen Chowdhury: Reverie and Reality, Kolkata: Emami Art, 2021, p. 10)

The flat application of black is a persistent feature of Chowdhury’s works of this time. This stylistic device draws the eye to the figures on the canvas and creates a tension between space and form. It is rooted in the artist’s childhood in Calcutta as a refugee of the Partition of India. He explains, “We did not have electricity in our house, and I had to read by the hurricane lantern. I had to fall back on black and white because we did not have enough light, and it helped draw in black, when you had the hurricane lantern for your source of light. This was one reason...why...black has had such a strong presence in my works...We had a miserable state of living when we came to Kolkata as refugees. Our plight, both physical and mental, must have also affected my use of colours.” (Jogen Chowdhury, Jogen Chowdhury: Selected Works From the Glenbarra Art Museum Japan, Japan: Glenbarra Art Museum, 2019, p. 12, 14)

Though economic in composition, Chowdhury’s canvases bear great emotional depth. By isolating his figures against a plain black background, he implies rather than declares the meaning of his work and “we are invited to speculate about the inner lives of his protagonists...” (Hoskote, p. 12). Like many of the artist’s human forms, the male figure in the present lot appears mildly distorted but the woman’s melancholic features are more realistic. This portrayal of women was informed by the sympathy he developed for the character played by the actor Binodini in the play Noti Binodini- “...whenever I have portrayed women, I have been moved by the same surge of sympathy...nowhere in my works have I been able to distort a woman’s features or figure. It is only with my men that I have made the most horrible distortions.” (Chowdhury, p. 39)

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