Gaganendranath Tagore, whose art was remarkable for its uniqueness, passed away on this day. He was 70. Gaganendranath was born in the Tagore family at Jorasanko. His father was
Gunendranath and his younger brother Abanindranath was a pioneer and leading artist of the Bengal School of Art. Gaganendranath was a nephew of Rabindranath Tagore.
With Abanindranath, he founded the Indian Society of Oriental Art. Gaganendranath’s earlier work shows a brilliant assimilation of Japanese brush work.
His illustrations for Rabindranath’s autobiography show this style. But he would later turn to satire, drawing caricatures of Indian society, especially of the upper crust and the powerful, such as the priest or the man about town.
The caricatures were stunningly original with their ballooning, grotesque, Aubrey Beardsley figures crushing the common people below.
Gaganendranath was deeply influenced by western modernist art movements and Japanese paintings, but incorporated these influences in his art in a way that it remained uniquely Indian and rooted in his immediate context. He is regarded as the only Indian painter who used Cubism before the 1940s. He wrote a children’s book titled Bhondor Bahadur.