Jogen Chowdhury wore many hats through the course of his long arts career — he was a practitioner whose works spoke in multiple registers; he was an arts administrator, setting up Charubasona, also called the Jogen Chowdhury Centre for Arts, a space dedicated to the visual arts; he was a revered academician, working first as reader and later as principal, at Kala Bhavan in Santiniketan; he was Keeper of Art at the Rashtrapati Bhavan; he was a member of the advisory committee of the National Gallery of Modern Art in Delhi; an illustrator of a book of poems; a jury member for biennales; and a curator for exhibitions; he was also a politician, joining the Rajya Sabha in 2014 on a nomination from the Trinamool Congress.
Chowdhury passed away on Sunday. He was 87. He was being treated for cancer for the past two years and was recently hospitalised with a urinary tract infection. Chowdhury was put on a ventilator on Saturday. He is survived by his wife, Shipra, and son, Soumya.
Chowdhury’s contribution to India’s artscape cannot be overstated, said curators, academics and gallerists Hindustan Times spoke to. They all spoke of his “child-like innocence”, youthfulness and collaborative spirit.
A prolific artist who sketched, made lithographs, watercolours, employing the crosshatch — the use of sets of overlapping lines to create shading and texture — to great effect in his distorted figures. Among his most famous works are his Dream series, which includes Reminiscences of A Dream (42), Tiger in the Moonlit Night, the Couple, among others. He was known for his unbroken, vein-like lines and crosshatches but it wasn’t his only idiom.
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“Beyond his extraordinary practice, he thought deeply about the larger ecosystem of Indian art: its forums, journals, institutions, and the generations still to come. Indian art has lost one of its most significant voices,” said Ushmita Sahu, who studied under Chowdhury in 1996 at Santiniketan.
Sahu, who is director and head curator of Kolkata-based gallery Emami Art, still recalls the lessons she picked up from the artist. “I had the privilege of being Jogen-da’s student at Kala Bhavana, and his presence there left a lasting mark on many of us. As an artist, he showed us that a single line could hold the whole weight of a life, with its tenderness, irony and quiet unease,” she said.
In 2019, Chowdhury opened a five-storey building opposite the busy South City Mall in Kolkata. Charubasona, the Jogen Chowdhury Centre for Arts was devoted entirely to the visual arts — one floor was reserved for seminars, another showcased Chowdhury’s own work and the ground floor was dedicated to showcasing younger artists.
“He was not only a friend, but also a mentor,” said Somak Mitra, founder of Kolkata-based gallery Art Exposure, who worked closely with Chowdhury.
“He made art till the very end — he would make these small postcards with sketches, and give them away to the nurses and doctors,” said Mitra, whose gallery helped organise three retrospectives of Chowdhury’s works in Delhi, Mumbai and Kolkata.
Another retrospective of the artist was being planned by the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art in Delhi in February 2027.
“Jogen was one of the pre-eminent artists of his generation, who had a very interesting personal language. On the surface, it seemed quite simple, but it also allowed him to say many things in many registers. He had many phases in his work, each offered something different. When he was very young, and just out of college, his works reflected heavily on the social realities of the time. In later years, he turned inwards. When he shifted to Delhi to work at the Rashtrapati Bhavan, he made portraits, seeing political players from up close. When he came to teach at Santiniketan, his works became a subtle commentary on Bengal and India, largely the middle class to which he belonged,” said R Siva Kumar, an art historian and art critic who was Chowdhury’s colleague at Santiniketan.
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Sunaina Anand, founder of New Delhi’s Art Alive gallery, recalls a 1958 piece by Chowdhury — a sketch he made while in school — which showed migrants sitting in a railway station. A note accompanying the sketch, written by Chowdhury in 2020 when he gave Anand the work for a Covid-19 fund-raiser, stated: “Thousands of Bengali Hindu refugees come even after 10 years of Partition from the east part of Bengal [formerly east Pakistan] and they arrive at Sealdah station. They are poor and they have no place to stay in West Bengal.”
“Jogenda was accessible across generations. He would get excited by younger artists doing something out of the box. He opened his home to all his students; Generations of students were influenced by him,” Anand said.
Chowdhury was born in 1939 in Faridpur (present-day Bangladesh), and moved to Kolkata with his family in 1948, leaving his ancestral home to settle in a refugee colony. After graduating from the Government College of Art and Craft, in 1960, he got a job in the Howrah Zilla School earning a salary of ₹125.
In 1965, he won a French government scholarship to study at L’Ecole Nationale Superiere des Beaux Arts and the following year, he was awarded the Prix le France de la Jeune Peinture, Paris. He also spent time at Stanley William Hayter’s Atelier 17, which opened him up to the world of printmaking and European conceptual modernism.
Upon his return, he became a member of Calcutta Painters, a group representing Calcutta Reality and moved to Chennai (then Madras) in 1968 to work as a textile designer for the Madras Handloom Board. In 1972, he joined the Rashtrapati Bhavan, New Delhi, as Keeper of Art, a post he held till 1987. During his stay in Delhi, he helped co-found Gallery 26 and Artists’ Forum, a collective, in 1975. He then joined Kala Bhavan, Santiniketan, as a Reader in the department of painting, and later became principal. Though he took voluntary retirement, he continued to remain connected with Santiniketan where he lived till a few years before his cancer diagnosis.
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Expressing his condolences, West Bengal chief minister Suvendu Adhikari said, “I wish immortality for his soul… He will inspire generations of artists.”
Adhikari’s predecessor Mamata Banerjee said Chowdhury “was the pride of Bengal and India.”
“A great inspiration to artists worldwide, and me personally… His passing will create an irreparable void in the world of art and culture,” she said on X.
(With inputs from Tanmay Chatterjee in Kolkata)
