Visual communication: Tagore

7/29/2019 Visual communication: Tagore

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- Over 1,000 poems; nearly 2 dozen plays and play-lets;

8 novels; 8 or more volumes of short stories; more than

2000 songs, mass of prose , his English translations; his

paintings; his travels and lecture-tours; his activities as

educationist, as social and religious reformer, andpolitician.

- His life's work is the accomplishment of a titan.


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RABINDRANATH TAGORE.

Gurudev Rabindranath Tagore

mystic, visionary, painter and Nobel laureate for

literature- was India's grand old man of letters.

Tagore has been immortalised not only by his poetry

but also by his paintings and his importantcontribution to Indian Art through Viswa-Bharati.


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BIOGRAPHY

Born in Jorasanko on 7th May 1861

seventh in a family of fourteen.

The Tagores were a cultured and wealthy family.

The poet's early life was spent in an atmosphere of

religion and arts, principally literature, music and

painting

Tagore died in Calcutta on August 7, 1941.


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BIOGRAPHY-EARLY LIFE

Rabindranath learnt drawing in his childhood

At the age of seventeen, his first book of poems was

published.

In 1878, he went to England for further studies but

returned back in just seventeen months as he was

disappointed with the studies.

Training in classical Indian music.


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EARLY WORKS

the English Gitanjali, was published in 1912.

Gitanjali saw him winning, in 1913, at the age of 52,

the Nobel Prize for literature.

The first Nobel prize ever awarded to an Asiatic,

made him world-famous.

knighted by the British in 1915.


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EARLY LIFE

In 1917, Tagore founded the innovative 'Viswa-

Bharati' university in the rural settings of

Shantiniketan, thus realizing a life-long dream- to

create a context for a genuine all-round developmentof human faculties.

Far from the neurosis of the city life, this was not to

be a degree-oriented establishment, but an attempt,

in his own words "to study the mind of Man in it's

realization of different aspects of truth from diverse

points of view."


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TRYST WITH PAINTING

Egged on by an insatiable urge for creativity, Tagorebegan wielding the brush at the age of 67.

In 1924, while writing "Purabi" he started doodling onthe pages of his manuscript

Rabindranath transformed his lack of formal training ofart into an advantage and opened new horizons in theuse of line and colour.

He was prolific in his paintings and sketches as he was inhis writing, producing over 2500 of these within a

decade. Over 1500 of them are preserved in Viswa-Bharati,

Santiniketan.


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COMPARISON OF HIS LITERARY WORKS

AND ART

It is evident that in his search of newer form of

expression in line and colour Rabindranath wastrying to express something different from what he

did in his poetry and songs.

If he sought peace and enlightenment in his songs,

he seems to explore darkness and mystery in hisdrawings.

Dark creatures and haunting landscapes of another,primordial and marvelous world, which constituted

Tagore's works puzzle and delight the world.


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HIS SAY

"People often ask me about the meaning of my

pictures. I remain silent even as my pictures are. It is

for them to express and not to explain. They have

nothing ulterior behind their own appearance for thethoughts to explore and words to describe, and that

appearance carries its ultimate worth. Then they

remain, otherwise they are rejected and forgotten

even though they may have some scientific truth orethical justification.


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SHOWS AND EXHIBITIONS

He held the first public and international exhibitionof his paintings in Paris in May 1930, at the GalleriePigalle.

The exhibition was later held in different countries in

Europe in the same year. But India and his home town Calcutta had the

honour of hosting it only in 1931

Duchess Anna de Noailles, in her introductory

remarks in the catalogue of the exhibition of Tagore'spaintings "To me it is like climbing a staircase ofdreamland"


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STYLE: SELF PORTRAITS

His self portraits are true representation of style.

According to the scholars his self-portraits reflect a

deeper psychological need - that of a creative person

always in search of self. His self portrait stands as anart of sheer excellence.

His painting style was very individual, characterised

by simple bold forms and a rhythmic quality, and

later served to inspire many modern Indian artists.


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STYLE: PRIMITIVE ART

He was immensely attracted to primitive art.Distortion of form and the aberrant use of colourcharacterized his paintings.

Theories of colour, mysticism and contemporary

speculations are likely to have interested him andthis has found expressions in his paintings.

Silence is the chief theme in his paintings. Colour,season and emotion all gain a remarkable dimension

in Tagore`s paintings. His paintings had a strange surrealism and bizarre

emotions.


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STYLE: IMAGES

His paintings are stark images of man and nature.They are not bound by known canons of art but areinstead expressions of freedom.

Many of the maestro's works are doodles that

resemble birds, faces and monsters. The subsequent phase shows figural compositions in

which human figures are placed in vertical positionsundertaking varied actions that make them seem

more dramatic. The works of his next phase are based on a simple

scheme of arranging figures in a single horizontalrow.


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Many of them represent animals, but they are

seldom of the ones we know of; he has described as

a probable animal that had missed its chance of

existence or a bird that only can soar in ourdreams. This led him to the creation of an

antediluvian menagerie.

Spurred by the same spirit of inventiveness he also

took to cross projecting the movement of a living

animal on to an imagined body, or a human gesture

onto an animal body and vice versa. This exchange

between the familiar and the unknown has led him

to forms that are as expressive as they are inventive.

STYLE: ANIMALS and BIRDS


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STYLE: HEADS AND FACES

He made individual heads where one sees a variety

of physiognomic features with distortions and varied

facial expressions such as a grimace, one of disgust,

one of laughter and so on. Of the Head' series, his female figures are more

graceful. The masculine heads, meanwhile, have a

greater variety ranging from the comic to tragic.


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STYLE: LANDSCAPES

Landscapes constitute a major theme of his

paintings.

In them, one can observe a steady growth towards

maturity and enriched vision. They indicate his growing sensibility and feeling for

the pictorial medium his deep understanding of the

medium, of colour, of texture, of the beauty and

rhythm of lines and how their potential could be

used for expressing the myriad moods and mystery

of nature.


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STYLE: LANDSCAPES

When he started using colours for landscapes, Tagoretried to capture the spirit of nature and the mood itevoked in his heart.

The common feature of these landscapes are

silhouetted trees placed against the sky on eitherside of the painted surface and the open middlethrough which the glow of the sky is seen.

Absence of human figures in his landscape gives

them a mysterious look. Reddish, brownish and yellowish tones that are

imbued with expressive power often contrast with ablack ground.


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STYLE

Elements of Expressionism and Art Nouvea can be

found in his works.


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IMMINENT STUDENTS

Tagore's paintings and sketches fascinated young

German students to mass hysteria. Among them a

student of the Art Academy of Munich Oswald

Malura. At Santiniketan, this amateur cinematogarpher

recorded a 12 minute-film on Tagore as a painter and

teacher in the open-air classes. There are some still

photographs that showed how Tagore drew andpainted but this movie film or cinema on Tagore as

an artist is indeed rare.

1986


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CONCLUSION

In Tagore's own words, "The world speaks to me in

colours, my soul answers in music". Obviously, the

soul was very articulate with colours too.

The drawings of Rabindranath Tagore proved that the

poet, though a master in the use of words, felt that

certain things can be better expressed, or perhaps

only expressed in the language of line, tone and

colour.


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CONCLUSION

He had said: We who have traded in lyrics should knowthat these will not find acceptance at another time. Thisis inevitable. So I often think that only painting has adeathless quality.

My pictures are verses in lines.

In his life, he embodied the quintessence of Indianculture, combining an abundant intellect with a devoutpassion to his cause, and his inspirational compositions

have stood the passage of time. Tagore's contribution tothe art of India remains one of the most important tilldate.


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Visual communication: Tagore

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