Rabindranath - Bengal’s first modern artist
The basic thing to understand about Rabindranath Tagore, says Lala Rukh Selim, of the Department of Sculpture, DU, is that he was active in almost every field of culture. “He contributed to almost every field of culture, specially the development of modern literature, music, fine arts, etc. of Bengal. Regarding his contributions to fine arts of Bengal, he has contributed uniquely; He was present during one of the crucial stages of Bengal art, when the people of Bengal realised anew that India had a unique cultural past and the artists of Bengal wanted to go back to the past and bring it to the present context, with transformations which gave rise to the Bengal School. When Abanindranath Tagore and others established the Bengal School of Art, Rabindranath was active at that time.”
As Rabindranth Tagore had been to Europe a few times, and been exposed to the Art of Europe, and had gone into a different phase with the Expressionists, Cubists and Fauvists, he came into some conclusions about what the role of an artist was and what the end of art truly was. “Tagore came to his own conclusions and differed from the Bengal School of artists. They created art due to some socio-political causes and wanted to say things through that art. But Rabindranath thought art should be the complete expression of an individual. It should not have a didactic purpose behind it,” she adds.
“If we look at his art we know that he was active as an artist in the last 20 years of his life. He created about 2500 art works. He did paint before that but he started regularly painting from 1928. We also know that Rabindranath had already matured in terms of his contribution to literature and music,” says Lala Rukh.
Rabindrnath’s art, says Lala Rukh is related to his different expressions of culture. His art grew out of his maturity and a way of expressing himself– what was unexpressed in his literature, she says. “The expression we find in his painting is much more free from considerations of society. He was already an established figure, and he had to live to a certain role in his literature. In art he was free from all those restrictions. That is what he always stressed :That an artist should give expression to the person within, says Lala Rukh.
His art evolved from his writings. He used to cross out pieces of his manuscripts and by joining the parts, his art grew out of the crossing outs. It grew out of his subconscious, as one does not consciously cross out parts of a manuscript, says Lala Rukh. The Surrealists believed with Freud that the conscious if suppressed, maybe expressed through our art, she says. “It puts a lot of insight into the mind. Thus Rabindranath’s art began with his pen and ink. He even used colours that he made himself and which did not last long. He felt free to experiment and step on to areas which had not been stepped onto before. We can say he was truly the first modern painter of Bengal. No one before him had painted with that much of freedom. In his educational establishment in Santiniketan he encouraged people to experiment and discover themselves. We find his students like Nanda Lal, Ram Kinkor Baij and Binod Bihari practising there and experimenting at will.”
One can classify his art into three distinct forms: The landscapes that he did which are very different from what people are usually used to seeing; the portraits that feature faces, specially women’s portraits; and the “phallic’ which present hidden eroticism, as Prof. Shiv Narayan Rai puts it.
“The paintings show that a person’s ideas can mature in different medias. Rabindranath did not learn the grammar of art, but he knew the grammar of how to express himself,” says Lala Rukh.
Fayza Haq
Source: The Daily Star
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