Artist Bio : Jogen Chowdhury

(source: Tehelka, April 14, 2006)

CROSSHATCH GENIUS

Jogen Chowdhury is often lazily referred to as an old master.
Lakshmi Indrasimhan reads him in more detail

Jogen Chowdhury’s figures crouch, clutch themselves and gracefully writhe in space. His paintings conjure up entire worlds where mysterious characters exist in empty rooms bound only by a hovering ink-black sky. Chowdhury’s work, among the most celebrated in contemporary Indian art, exhibits a consistent tonality and brooding discomfort that evokes Picasso’s Blue Period paintings. His new show at New Delhi’s Vadehra Art Gallery, titled ‘Abahoman: Flowing Life’, retains many of his earlier obsessions and influences, while expanding into new media and techniques.

Chowdhury is often lazily described as an old master of Indian painting, a label critic Ranjit Hoskoté takes particular issue with. “I am sceptical of the ‘old master’ tag because it has a larger art historical meaning. If one tries to place Jogen, it would be within the new generation of Indian artists who were looking at both the local and the autobiographical, and who all participated in a 1981 benchmark exhibition. Jogen and these artists succeeded, and in many ways opposed, people like Husain, Souza, Padamsee, Sabavala. So I’m always astounded to hear gallerists and reviewers embalm him in this ‘old masters’ cloth.”

Chowdhury’s work eschews traditional categorisation. Hoskoté notes that while “a lot of Jogen’s work is graphic and shows the printmaker’s love of process, he has this ability to mix varied things: conté and graphite, pastel and ink. So while he is called a painter, none of his paintings are in a sense painting. He just brushes past this hierarchy we have: oil painting at the top and everything else below.” Chowdhury himself is wary of labels. “The purpose is not the medium but to do creative work. There are no boundaries. Drawing can be as important as painting. The drawing itself is a complete artwork, not just a sketch you do before the painting.”

Alka Pande, curator of the Habitat Visual Arts Gallery, comments: “Jogen’s not just about drawing and painting, he’s also about poetry, about the consciousness of the geography and locality of where he is.” And where he is, is most often Bengal. He has lived in Shantiniketan for years because of his belief in “Tagore’s ideology and in his total thinking about life, culture, religion, politics. I like to live and work here, not just because of the institution but because I feel this place still has a lot of spirit, despite the changes that have come over it.”

Chowdhury has often commented on how Partition and his East Bengali origins influenced his decision to become an artist. Of how Bengal shaped his aesthetic, restorer Aman Nath notes, “He has been hugely successful in creating a very personal style that’s languishing, languorous, Bengali in all capitals.” Hoskoté agrees. “If you are attentive, his work goes back to a certain Calcutta theatre, a certain part of Shantiniketan — a lot of history gets encrypted in his work. I think that’s Jogen’s strength: the range he has, the ability to compress large histories into gestures.”

For someone schooled in Paris, Chowdhury asserts he “was conscious of what was happening in the West but also of what traditions and ways of life we had in India. No other country can give such a variety of issues and cultures, and all these are helpful to a creative person. You can’t stay in Switzerland and do something interesting. You can stay in India and do much more.” The narrative tenor of his work reflects this interest in the every day. At the same time, says Hoskoté, “there’s a theatrical aspect to his painting. He just takes two people, a couple, and invokes a whole history of desire, frustrations, things going wrong.” Most important about Chowdhury’s work for Hoskoté is that “he addresses the sensual drive in a way that very few of his predecessors did. And it’s true it does connect to the very old great masters. There is something of Titian, there is something of Rembrandt in him, in that he examines what it means to inhabit the flesh at a very basic level. The crisis of the flesh. That is basically Jogen’s theme and always has been.”

Despite the monumentality of his figures, the surfaces of his paintings are alive with texture. The sandy skin, the bodies wrinkled to look like tree trunks and roots. One of the clichés that has dogged Jogen is the singular importance he gives to cross-hatching. Says Hoskoté, “People act as if the cross-hatch by itself were something profound and privileged. What is far more interesting is the range of his line, which can evoke tonalities with a single stroke.” Chowdhury himself says he has the ability to “bring out in any form or object or human figure the organic quality in them, the three-dimensionality. It is already there and within me.”

And though Chowdhury’s style exhibits an almost primeval grace, he is not immune to the influence of modern techniques. For the large serigraphs in his latest show, he has used a computer. “I am not sure how successful they are but it’s still interesting,” he says. His only regret is that since the printing was done in Ahmedabad, he did not have full control over the end result. The serigraphs also utilise colour in a new way. “I felt the colour could give something different. Most of my stuff is black and grey, but I also know what good colour is and though psychologically I cannot always do that, when it suits something I do it.”

Nath has much praise for the man behind the work. “What I like about him is that he’s never hustled his work. He’s quietly doing his thing; he laughs himself off, his work off.” To the recurring question about the growing commercialisation of art in India, Chowdhury replies with equanimity. “In India art activity was once very limited. Only the sincerest artists were busy. Now there are more artists, thousands, where before there were hundreds. Of these only 50 are doing good work, but before it was 20, so now at least there are more good artists and appreciation has grown.”