1861–1941 · Jorasanko, Calcutta
Rabindranath Tagore
The poet who won the Nobel Prize in 1913 began painting in his sixties and left well over two thousand paintings and drawings. Most began as the crossings-out in his manuscripts.
Tagore was born at the family house in Jorasanko, Calcutta, in 1861. By the time he began to paint he had written the songs, plays and poems that won him the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1913, and had started the school at Santiniketan that grew into Visva-Bharati.
The paintings came late, in his sixties, and they came out of his manuscripts. He corrected by crossing out, and the crossings-out joined up into shapes: birds, heads, creatures that belong to no zoo. He had tried a sketchbook around 1900 and given it up, finding he used the eraser more than the pencil. By the late 1920s the doodles had become pictures in their own right.
He looked at carvings from New Ireland, the Haida carvers of the Pacific Northwest, and the woodcuts of Max Pechstein. He was probably red-green colour-blind, which may explain his unusual colour.
His first public exhibition was in Paris in 1930, at the Galerie Pigalle, with help from the Argentine writer Victoria Ocampo. Shows in Birmingham, London and other European cities followed. By his death in 1941 he had made more than two thousand paintings and drawings.
About 1,700 of them are at Visva-Bharati in Santiniketan, in Rabindra Bhavana and Kala Bhavana. The National Gallery of Modern Art in New Delhi lists about a hundred.
Notable works
- Untitled (Birds)1930
