Abanindranath Tagore

Abanindranath Tagore (1871-1951), was the principal artist of the Bengal school and the first major exponent of swadeshi values in Indian art. He was also a noted writer.

Tagore sought to modernise Moghul and Rajput traditions in order to counter the influence of Western models of art, as taught in Art Schools under the British Raj. Such was the success of Tagore's work that it was eventually accepted and promoted as a national Indian style within British art institutions.

Life

Tagore was a member of the distuinguished Bengali family, and a naphew of the poet Rabindranath Tagore. His grandfather and his elder brother Gaganendranath Tagore were also artists. Tagore learned art when studying at Sanskrit college in the 1880s. In 1889 he married Srimati Suhasini Devi, daughter of Bhujagendra Bhusan Chatterjee, a descendant of Prasanna Coomar Tagore. At this time he left the Sanskrit College after nine years of study and studied English as a special student at St. Xavier's College, which he attended for about a year and a half.

In the early 1890s several illustrations were published in Sadhana magazine, and in Chitrangada, and other works by Rabindranath Tagore. He also illustrated his own books. About the year 1897 he took lessons from the Vice-Principal of the Calcutta Government School of Art, studying in the traditional European academic manner, learning the full range of techniques, but with a particular interest in watercolour. At this time he began to come under the influence of Mughal art, making a number of works based on the life of Krishna in a Mughal-influenced style. After meeting E. B. Havell, Tagore worked with him to revitalise and redefine art teaching at the Calcutta School of art, a project also supported by his brother Gaganendranath, who set up the Indian Society of Oriental Art.

The publication of his book Gitanjali in English brought Tagore international renown, which helped to make his artistic projects better known in the west.

Art

Tagore believed that Western art was "materialistic" in character, and that India needed to return to its own traditions in order to recover spiritual values. Despite its nationalism, this view was quite commonplace within British art of the time, stemming from the ideas of the Pre-Raphaelites. Partly for this reason many British arts administrators were sympathetic to such ideas, especially as Hindu philosophy was becoming increasingly influential in the West following the spread of the Theosophy movement. Tagore believed that Indian traditions could be adapted to express these new values, and to promote a progressive Indian national culture.

With the success of Tagore's ideas, he came into contact with other Asian artists whose work was comparable to his own. In his later work, he began to incorporate elements of Chinese and Japanese calligraphic traditions into his art, seeking to construct a model for a modern pan-Asian artistic tradition which would merge the common aspects of Eastern spiritual and artistic culture.