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The Art of Peace: Paintings by the poet Rabindranath Tagore
Untitled, painting by Rabindranath Tagore
Tagore's paintings are unique. His travels around the world brought him into contact with different artistic movements and he was probably aware of contemporary ideas from Europe such as Dadaism and Surrealism, which emphasised the role of dreams and the imagination. The imagery on show in his work contains elements of fantasy, abstraction and dreams, but he did not seem to follow a particular style or school of painting.
This work of the late 1920s seems to depict an animal, perhaps a bull. It appears to have three legs, a head with one eye, a forward-pointing horn, a prominent hump and a long tail with a tuft at the end. But, like so many of Tagore's paintings, it is untitled and can be interpreted in different ways.
It was created using coloured ink applied with a metal-nibbed pen, which gives the surface a shimmering quality depending on the light.