Jogen Chowdhury

Contemporary Indian Paintings from the Chester and Davida Herwitz Collection, Sotheby's New York, 5 December 2000, lot 66

Oxford, Museum of Modern Art, India: Myth & Reality - Aspects of Modern Indian Art, 1982

New York, The Grey Art Gallery and Study Center, New York University, Contemporary Indian Art from the Chester and Davida Herwitz Family Collection, December 1985 - January 1986

Valencia, Institut Valencia d'Art Modern (IVAM), India Moderna, 11 December 2008 - 15 February 2009

Musgrave, V., India: Myth and Reality, Aspects of Modern Indian Art, Museum of Modern Art Oxford, Oxford, 1982, p. 33 illus.

Sokolowski, T., Contemporary Indian Art from the Chester and Davida Herwitz Family Collection, The Grey Art Gallery, New York, 1985, p. 48 illus.

Jhaveri, A., A Guide to 101 Modern and Contemporary Indian Artists, Mumbai, 2005, p. 26 illus.

Guardoila, J. et. al., India Moderna, Institut Valencia d'Art Modern (IVAM), Valencia, 2008, p. 232 illus.

Good overall condition.
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Like many of his contemporaries, Jogen Chowdhury places an emphasis on the autobiographical narrative in his work. He references local traditions and popular visual culture to comment on the complexities and contradictions of Bengali middle-class society. Chowdhury's paintings often depict the people that surround him in his everyday life. He combines fantasy with reality to produce figures that are often grotesque and distorted. "The sheer range of characters, temperaments and manners that I observed in the people that I saw around myself fascinated me. I portrayed them from an essentially personal perspective. In my characterisation of these people, I crossed the bounds of realistic representation and let imagination take over." (The artist quoted in Jogen Chowdhury - Enigmatic Visions, Glenbarra Art Museum, 2005, p.31). His subjects are usually rendered against a black background, their fluid contours tightened with cross-hatching and heightened with touches of colour.

Chowdhury was born in East Bengal and during Partition was moved with his family to Calcutta. In 1965, Chowdhury went to Paris on a French Government scholarship where he studied at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts. He also worked at Atelier 17, a print studio set up by the English artist, Stanley William Hayter, where Krishna Reddy was assistant director. Chowdhury's return to India from Paris in 1967 marked a turning point in his career. In 1969 he began his famous series, Reminiscences of a Dream. These intricate ink and wash crosshatched drawings echoed the etchings he produced whilst working at the Atelier. That same year, Chowdhury wrote: "The artist creates his works from his imagination, from his dreams, from a single image or sound of the past, from the pain of today or from contradictions of his life." (Susan Bean, Midnight to the Boom: Painting in India after Independence, London, 2013, p.142).

It was during the 1970s that Chowdhury began to include references to popular visual culture. During this period he also developed his own unique approach for the treatment of the figures in his canvases. He drew inspiration from folk art sources, including Kalighats and Battala woodcuts. In 1972, Chowdhury moved to Delhi where he was appointed curator at the Rashtrapati Bhavan. During his time there he began to incorporate deities within his works. The current lot is part of the Ganesha series that Chowdhury produced towards the end of his tenure. Another work from the series is in the Peabody Essex Museum (ibid., p. 145, pl. 34). In both works the artist plays on the popular characterisation of the elephant god Ganesha. Normally depicted with plump skin and a generous belly (as seen in classical Indian sculpture), Chowdhury instead shows the deity wrinkled and flaccid, his trunk angular and hands contorted. Chowdhury acknowledges that Ganesha is particularly favoured by the business-minded Marwari community of Calcutta. The artist reported that his representation of Ganesha is meant to represent that community, rather than the god himself (ibid. p. 143). The rolls of fat, sagging breasts and weak limbs can also be regarded as 'a fitting icon for the late 1970s, a bitter period for many in India, particularly artitsts, who suffered chilling constraints on freedom of expression during the emergency.' (ibid.).