At 67, India's Greatest Writer Quietly Became Its Strangest Painter
Rabindranath Tagore won the Nobel Prize, wrote two national anthems, and then, at 67, began crossing out his own words until the corrections became art.
The most decorated writer in Asia had a secret habit. When Rabindranath Tagore crossed out a word in his manuscripts, he could not leave the deletion alone. He would connect one crossing-out to another, coax the scratches into shapes, until the margins of his poems crawled with birds, faces and creatures that had nothing to do with the text. The corrections were becoming pictures.
By 1928, around his 67th year, the doodles staged a takeover. The Nobel laureate, the man who gave India and Bangladesh their national anthems, began to paint seriously: thousands of works over the final decade or so of his life, feverish, dark and unlike anything else in Indian art.
They are not comfortable pictures. Brooding faces emerge from black washes. Veiled women stare past the viewer with unreadable expressions. Imaginary beasts stalk through landscapes that exist nowhere. While his nephews Abanindranath and Gaganendranath were building refined artistic movements, the elder Tagore painted like a man with no schooling and no debts, because artistically he had neither.
He spent sixty years mastering words, then spent his last decade escaping them.
He never gave his paintings titles. He rarely explained them. Scholars note his probable red-green colour blindness, which may explain the strange, smouldering palettes. Tagore himself simply called his pictures his 'versification in lines', and let them stay mysterious.
In 1930 the paintings travelled to Paris, where the Galerie Pigalle gave the 68-year-old debutant his first exhibition. Europe, expecting the serene sage of 'Gitanjali', met instead these urgent, modern, unsettling images. The show travelled on through Europe and beyond, making Tagore one of the first Indian artists exhibited so widely in the West.
The lesson hiding in the story is about permission. Tagore had every reason not to paint: no training, failing health, a reputation that could only suffer. He painted anyway, prolifically, joyfully, strangely. The greatest late-career swerve in Indian culture began as marginalia.
Somewhere in a manuscript, a crossed-out word is still visible beneath the ink that turned it into a bird. That is as good a definition of art as any: the mistake, refusing to stay a mistake.
Comments