| Jogen Chowdhury |
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Biography
Jogen was born in Faridpur (now in Bangladesh) in 1939. He was eight years old when the communitarian rioting of the Partition engulfed Bengal. In 1947, that year of unbearably mixed jubilation and lamentation, colonial India gained its independence at an enormous cost in death and human suffering, as well as a legacy of conflict and psychological damage. Families were separated and destroyed; homes and homelands were lost; two warring nations were created, India as a secular republic, Pakistan as an Islamic state. In 1955, Jogen joined the Government College of Arts and Crafts, Calcutta, graduating in 1960. While there, he was trained in an orthodox academic grind, but it gave him both a sense of direction and a lifelong discipline. As a student, he was greatly struck by an exhibition of Kathe Kollwitz’s lithographs; he acknowledges the impact of her strong, emphatic lines on his art. He also saw albums of Degas in the college library, and learned from him the art of taking the emotional temperature of a situation. He recalls the excitement of going out into the city on sketching expeditions, to New Market, to Sealdah station where he would sketch homeless refugees sleeping on the platforms, to the stables where his colleague Sunil Das would sketch horses.
In 1965, the young artist was awarded a French Government Scholarship to study at the Ecole des Beaux Arts and Atelier 17, Paris. Returning to India, he worked briefly at the Weavers’ Service Centre in Madras, before moving to New Delhi in 1972, as curator at the Presidential Estate, Rashtrapati Bhavan. Very soon, he was invited to participate in two landmark exhibitions of contemporary Indian art, ‘Pictorial Space’ (1977) and ‘Place for People’ (1981). Jogen eventually became a distinguished teacher and academic administrator at Santiniketan’s Viswa Bharati, Tagore’s utopian forest-university. He now lives and works in Santiniketan, although he retains bases in Calcutta and New Delhi; during the last decade, he has traveled extensively in Europe, North America and Asia. These transitions and pilgrimages have imbued his art with a plenitude of sensations and novel interests; and yet, Jogen has never been tempted into desultory excursions away from his key preoccupations. |
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