Author: Rabindranath Tagore
Publisher: Rupa
Year: 2004
Language: English
Pages: 75
ISBN/UPC (if available): 8129104628
Description
RABINDRANATH TAGORE was not only a great poet and novelist but also a great artist. He started painting in his late sixties and continued painting till he died. He left behind more than 2500 paintings and drawings, all done between 1928-41.
Tagore’s paintings are bereft of all spiritual solace; they portray silence and loneliness. They are also very strange-the viewer is not sure how to view his paintings. Many of the paintings in this volume can be placed beside the works of major twentieth-century artists.
Some painters cannot be labelled or put in any class. They are in a class of their own. You cannot compare them with other painters because no other painter is like them. They have no imitators, no followers. They are unique. Hieronymus Bosch, El Greco and Tagore were unique in this special sense. Albrecht Durer once said of Bosch's paintings that nothing like them was ever seen before nor thought of by any other man. It nearly sums up what you can say about Tagore's paintings.
The grotesque creatures which people the universe of his paintings, the surreal landscapes sadly glowing with a light that never was on sea or land, the bizarre and haunting faces that look and do not look at you, the flowers you will never find in a garden or botany book-they all exist in a world way beyond reality. Most artists paint what they see. Tagore painted what he did not see. Or saw only in his mind. He did not want to sit in the stagnation of realism.