tour 6 of 8
The Art of Peace: Paintings by the poet Rabindranath Tagore
Untitled, zoomorphic paintings by Rabindranath Tagore
In the late 1920s Tagore produced a group of
paintings (perhaps to illustrate a now lost manuscript), which have
a strange, haunted, almost nightmarish quality to
them.
They seem to depict a
series of animals, but are dark in character and colour. It is
thought that Tagore may have been colour-blind and unable to
distinguish between red and green. The frequent appearance of
shades of brown, a mixture of these, in his paintings could be a
result of this
condition.
This particular
work is a painting on paper in blue-black wash with white
highlights of a seated reptile-like creature with a prominent eye,
long fanged snout and angular
legs.
The series is
considered to be the work of an old man who lived through difficult
times. Tragically three of Tagore's five children died
before him. He was also deeply affected by the violence of World
War I (1914-18) and the closing years of British rule in India. In
1919 he returned the knighthood bestowed upon him by the British
crown following the Amritsar Massacre in which British soldiers
opened fire on unarmed civilians and killed an estimated 379
people.