Jogen Chowdhury never needed to announce his arrival. In an art world increasingly given to media-manufactured spectacle, bombast and obtuse curatorial prose. Jogen possessed the rare confidence of an artist comfortable in his own skin. His work needed no intellectual scaffolding; it could stand firmly on its own.
Yet the remarkable achievement of his subsequent career was that he absorbed these influences without surrendering his own artistic identity. He subsequently joined Kala Bhavana at Visva Bharati, Santiniketan, eventually becoming its principal and later Professor Emeritus. But it is the art, rather than the honours, that tells us who Jogen was. His sinuous lines, sensuous forms and obsessive cross-hatching gave the human body an extraordinary psychological presence. His figures could appear vulnerable, grotesque, tender or faintly absurd, sometimes all at once. Beneath their tactile surfaces lay a profound understanding of human frailty and the contradictions of everyday existence. His was a visual language deeply rooted in the Indian imagination, yet never provincial in its reach. I had the pleasure of meeting Jogen on several occasions and visiting his studios. Jogen gingerly negotiated its extraordinary contours, until our artistic enterprise ran into the objections of overzealous guards. He promptly brandished his Rajya Sabha credentials. And voila, art, it appeared, came with parliamentary privileges. Years later, at his magnificent retrospective at Emami Art in Kolkata, he shared quiet anecdotes about some of his most celebrated works. It was a pleasure to discover the stories behind those extraordinary surfaces, but equally revealing was the man himself, warm, unpretentious, and possessed of a dry wit that needed no amplification. Jogen was a true Indian original, untouched by the compulsions of fashionable, derivative art practices or the need to perform importance for the media. His work did not require an elaborate curatorial alibi, and he did not need to shout to be heard. I shall remember him not merely for the singularity of his art, but for the warmth of our encounters, the stories he shared and the quiet authority with which he inhabited his world. His lines might wander, twist and tremble, but they always knew where they were going. And so, unmistakably, did he.
Born in Faridpur, in what is now Bangladesh, in 1939, Jogen’s early life was shaped by Partition and his family’s migration to what was then called Calcutta. He graduated from the Government College of Art and Craft in 1960, before travelling to Paris on a French government scholarship in 1965. His years at the École des Beaux-Arts and William Hayter’s Atelier 17 exposed him to European modernism and printmaking. Returning to India, Jogen worked at the Weavers’ Service Centre in Madras before becoming Keeper of Art at Rashtrapati Bhavan, a position he held from 1972 to 1987. He received numerous honours, including the Kalidas Samman in 2001 and West Bengal’s Banga Bibhushan in 2012, while his election to the Rajya Sabha in 2014 marked another chapter in an unusually expansive public life. On one memorable occasion, I even briefly abducted him for a photographic excursion to Jantar Mantar, whose graphic, almost otherworldly architectural geometry has fascinated me since I first encountered it as a schoolboy in 1982.
