Gaganendranath Tagore

Gaganendranath Tagore was born at Jorasanko, Calcutta, in 1867, the eldest son of Gunendranath Tagore and the elder brother of Abanindranath. The poet Rabindranath was his uncle. He had no formal education to speak of and learned painting from the watercolourist Harinarayan Bandopadhyay.

In 1907 he and Abanindranath founded the Indian Society of Oriental Art, which later published the influential journal Rupam. Between 1906 and 1910 he studied Japanese brush technique and the art of the Far East, and it shows in his illustrations for Rabindranath’s memoir Jeevansmriti (1912). He went on to his own manner in the Chaitanya and Pilgrim series.

Then he left the revivalism of the Bengal School behind and took up caricature. The Modern Review printed many of his cartoons in 1917, and his satirical lithographs came out as books: Adbhut Lok, or Realm of the Absurd, in 1917; Naba Hullod, or Reform Screams, in 1921; and Birupa Bajra, or Play of Opposites, in 1930. Bengal’s manners and its reformers got little mercy.

Between about 1920 and 1925 he began to paint in the language of Cubism, and from 1925 he worked out a more complex style of his own that came after it. The historian Partha Mitter calls him the only Indian painter before the 1940s to use the syntax of Cubism in his painting.

He loved the theatre and wrote a children’s book in the manner of Lewis Carroll, Bhodor Bahadur, or Otter the Great. He died in 1938. The actress Sharmila Tagore is his great-granddaughter.