He painted with black because he knew its darkness as no child should. A wounded civilisation was the canker his paintings wore to sear a nation’s soul. His own intimacies became autobiographical memories in which lines laid bare the bankruptcy of flesh. The transactionality of relationships he drew bled his paintings of any warmth. The cultural and the symbolic were inveigled into an unforgiving modern. Jogen Chowdhury was humanity’s history keeper who could never understand why his paintings came to be loved when his thesis was the narrative of the scorned.
Perhaps it was because of the way he looked: lean and elegant in the manner of an aesthete, his curling locks framing a sensitive face, a patrician nose. He wore kurtas that would seem shabby on others but draped him like nobility. His simplicity bore the natural authority of a zamindari that should have been his inheritance. He was unforgiving as a teacher but kind as a person, strong-willed yet soft, smart and naïve. He was master and maestro, trained in Calcutta and Paris, a citizen of the world who would not be separated from his dal-bhaat: a colossus who marked both change and continuity in a practice that is left looking at a void at his passing.
We shared a birth date in common and little else. The score years that separated us weren’t unbridgeable, yet we never worked directly together—certainly not for lack of trying. His works were part of collections that I curated into shows, we spoke often, he was amiable, soft-spoken and apparently amenable, but as twisty as an eel when it came to commitments. He’d promise to respond or write or call before disappearing into the neverland of Santiniketan. Interviews and interpretations and access were never denied; it was his work he was reluctant to part with. The retrospective I dreamed of, that he never promised, was a reminder of the way to view his work: through a patina of poignancy and pain.
Jogenda wore his Bengaliness like a badge of honour and it was the line of his Bengali predecessors that became his language of commitment to his practice. It bent and swerved, rose and fell, swooped and dipped in the manner of the Kalighat patua and Jamini Roy, their history transforming his studio into a laboratory where ideas were shaped by cultural pedagogy into which he infused a breath of much-needed social and political reality. He made the ugly beautiful and the beautiful ugly. Satire was his weapon. He did not stoop to humour in life, but it was the acid in his practice.
Beginning at a time when artists could not dream of sustaining themselves through art, he worked at the Weavers’ Service Centre in what is now Chennai, and then as the keeper of art at Rashtrapati Bhawan in New Delhi, and would eventually wind up in the Rajya Sabha in the autumn of his career as a Trinamool supporter. He learned the ways of officialdom but used the opportunities of the street to do what he did best: observe the shenanigans of the poweratti and redact it to a couple of lines that spoke truth to power. The powerful rarely saw themselves in his lampooning because it was not representation but ideas that he painted. His was an adda of the reclusive mind rather than the noisy rostrums of his more demonstrative colleagues. Confidences were rarely shared, nor was he demonstrative of his affections, but the young always knew they could lean on him for support.
If his work is powerful, and political, his speech was reticent, and diplomatic. The first time I had tea with him was in a kulhad, the next in bone china, once over jhaal-muri; each time he was impervious to his surroundings. He was smart about what money commanded, and what he himself demanded, but was neither insatiable, nor greedy. He was criticised for his prolific doodling but those sketches and drawings—far fewer than MF Husain or FN Souza—supported small gallerists and dealers to whom, he said, he owed a sense of gratitude. He saw his works shift into museums, shape collections, and grow muscular in valuations long before he was seized by cancer, by which time he had built institutions in Santiniketan and Kolkata where art—his as well as of younger artists—could be shown to whatever gatherings he would command. He was both giant and giant-slayer.
Much will be said of Jogen Chowdhury’s art and life in times to come, both of which will provoke equal measures of affection and consternation. In an exhibition curated by me last month, there were six works by Jogenda that were representative of his entire oeuvre—the cross-hatched prisoner of Abu Ghraib, his wounds visceral; a woman on a bed: wanton seductress or exploited mistress; tortured bodies, fisheyes, lines that appeared to leer as well as offer solace. Hanging the show, aware of his illness, it was an au revoir to his greatness, a fitting goodbye to a painter whose recognisability marked him out in his lifetime and—in death—rendered him beyond the clutches of time.