Head Study (Geometric)

A profile head in black ink, but the skull has become architecture: a gabled roof, tiers of slatted floors, a staircase running down through the face. The background is a dense net of crossed lines, and a row of small scratched panels runs along the bottom like a frieze.

Tagore had tried to draw for most of his life and never felt he could. He took up drawing and painting in earnest at sixty, and kept at it until his death in 1941. The work had its debut in Paris in 1930, followed by exhibitions across Europe.

Writers on his work point to sources as far apart as Malanggan carving from New Ireland, Haida carving and Max Pechstein’s woodcuts; he may also have been red-green colour blind, which would account for some of his strange colour. This drawing uses none: only ink and the white of the paper.