Artist, poet and teacher, Jogen Chowdhury is one of the most significant artists of post-Independence India, known for his dramatic treatment of human and derivative forms. His early career traces an unusual path to primitivism. Unlike Rabindranath Tagore, Jamini Roy or Sunayani Devi, who arrived at it without formal schooling, Chowdhury reached it by learning the academic tradition and then moving beyond it. Born in East Bengal, Faridpur, he migrated with his family to Calcutta during Partition and studied at the Government College of Art and Crafts, Kolkata, from 1955 to 1960, a period of training in British academic methods. He later described his reservations:
“The problem with the art college on Kolkata is that art teaching begins with the conventional modules of life study, still-life composition and so on, with no scope for the art student to reach out to a level of thinking that can raise him to a higher plane of creativity.”
Five years later, a French Government Scholarship gave him a second period of academic training, enabling him to study at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. He doubted the trip was constructive, feeling it impeded more than it promoted his natural development. He emerged from the training an accomplished draughtsman, able to depict the nude model naturalistically, with little sign of his own idiosyncratic vision. Yet he has insisted that exposure to different traditions in an urban context is necessary to develop an independent artistic personality: a boy in the village, cut off from urban life, cannot develop his talent as an artist.
The bodies he draws come into being with an almost indolent casualness. Disproportion is their essential quality, the sign of their naturalness — not the doodles of the unschooled, since it does not arise from a lack of perception or an incapacity to draw. Academic training remained part of the process, however far the results move from a life-class drawing. Chowdhury himself distinguishes three levels of form: ‘real form (realistic, naturalistic form), charged with the inner expression of oneself (expressionistic form) and abstract ideas or form (abstraction).’
Having moved away from academic training early in his career, Chowdhury developed a style of cross-hatching to create his amorphous human, animal and other forms. The works carry no specific time or place, recalling instead the dislocation and loss of home he experienced as a boy. Static and distorted, his dream-like exaggerations carry narratives of domesticity, eroticism and psychological reality, with a distinctly primordial quality.
“There is a certain power in the stillness of an object. Stillness is a form of speed while not in force. It is a stillness that can create greater tension in a work of art,” says the artist.
Chowdhury has taken part in art camps and workshops in India and abroad. In 1957, he took part in a major group show at New Delhi's Lalit Kala Akademi. His first solo show came in 1963, with drawings and paintings exhibited at Calcutta's Academy of Fine Arts. He has since exhibited internationally in Washington D.C., Oxford and Tokyo, including shows at London's Royal Academy of Art and the Havana and São Paulo biennales.
Jogen Chowdhury has worked in a range of materials and mediums — ink, pastel, serigraph and painted platters — and is widely collected in India and abroad.