Jogen Chowdhury

Jogen Chowdhury was born in 1939 in Daharpara, a village in Faridpur district, now in Bangladesh. His father painted scenes for the village theatre and modelled images of gods; his mother was skilled at alpana, the ritual floor drawings of Bengal. The family came to Calcutta around Partition, and his first painting went on the wall of his uncle’s quarters.

He studied at the Government College of Art and Craft in Calcutta, graduating in 1960, taught art at a school in Howrah and worked as a textile designer for the Handloom Board. In 1965 he went to Paris, to the École des Beaux-Arts and Hayter’s Atelier 17, and returned in 1968 to find his own way of drawing.

That way was the line. His best-known pictures are in ink, watercolour and pastel, and his figures, men and women, are distorted just enough to edge toward caricature. R. Siva Kumar has written about how cloth, bolsters, sofas and the human body bleed into one another in his work, swollen and slack at once. Golpo Bola (Story Teller), a charcoal drawing of 1984, is one example.

From 1972 he was curator of the art collection at Rashtrapati Bhavan in New Delhi, and in 1975 he helped found Gallery 26 and the Artists’ Forum. In 1987 he joined Kala Bhavana at Santiniketan as professor of painting. He wrote poetry, served in the Rajya Sabha from 2014, and in 2019 opened Charubasona to house his life’s work. He died in Kolkata on 25 October 2026, aged 87.