Gaganendranath Tagore

Gaganendranath Tagore (1867-1938) was born in Kolkata, West Bengal, into a family whose works defined Bengal's cultural life. Tagore was the forerunner of modern Indian painting, having portrayed his grasp and expressiveness like no other artist of his era. Multi-faceted, bold and radical artist, he was also a caricaturist, actor, painter and interior decorator.

Gaganendranath received no conventional training in painting except under the watercolour master Harinarayan Bandopadhyay. In 1907, alongside his sibling Abanindranath, he established the Indian Society of Oriental Art, which later published the persuasive journal Rupam. Between 1906 and 1910, he concentrated on the Japanese brush methods, while fostering his methodology in Chaitanya and Pilgrim series. Gaganendranath, in the long run, abandoned the revivalism of the Bengal School and undertook caricature. Influenced by the swadeshi movement of the early 20th century, he contributed extraordinarily to the representation of hand-crafted antiques in an attempt to make the cabin business of Bengal famous. In 1916, he was designated as one of the secretaries of the Bengal Home Industries Association.

Gaganendranath is considered to be one of the first Indian painters in the 1940s to make use of the language and syntax of Cubism in his paintings. His works were shown in Paris, London, Hamburg, Berlin, and America. He was known to continually stretch out his assistance to promising painters. Most importantly, although he was unable to make a school of followers, nor could he create any specific trend for posterity, his experiment in expressing sarcasm and humour towards the emerging Indian hypocrisy was instrumental.  He, however, has achieved an elevated place among progressive artists. Today, Gagendranath Tagore’s works prove an important tool for contemporary art pedagogy.