From the India Today archives (1986)

India Today

06-05-2025

(NOTE: This article was originally published in the India Today issue dated March 31, 1986)
"I know not who paints the pictures on memory's canvas; but whoever he may be, what he is painting are pictures; by which I mean that he is not there with his brush simply to make a faithful copy of all that is happening."
—Rabindranath Tagore in Jivansmriti (Memoirs)
The faces are gaunt and sombre. The highlights on their surface defy all principles of optics, as if lit up by unexpected chinks in some cloistered studio of the psyche. The landscapes are marked by lines that change their course and hardness following some inner dictate of the soul. The lines are far from geometric, as if corresponding to some nervy impulses of auto-drawing. But regardless, the paintings of Rabindranath Tagore have left art-lovers stunned by their simplicity and the artist's ability to paint from the heart.
But Tagore the artist never really received the commercial acclaim his works deserved—till now, that is, For the past year, Calcutta's traditional art dealers have been receiving enquiries for "any Tagore" with cash offers of Rs 1 lakh or above, the highest offer for the bulk of work of any modern Indian painter, alive or dead.
Film actor Victor Bannerjee, who is also an avid collector and the owner of Calcutta's first commercial gallery, bought in 1982 an unnamed portrait by Tagore, painted on paper and not larger than 18x10 inches, for only Rs 10,000. Today he is being offered Rs 80,000 to Rs 1 lakh but he refuses to part with it. "I must hold on to it till the temptation is too great, and the pride in possessing a Tagore may eventually outweigh all financial temptations," declares the actor.
Rani Chanda, who authored many books on Tagore and now lives at Santiniketan, jealously guards her eight Tagore paintings from dealers foraying to her home with offers of Rs 5 lakh for the entire collection. Pradip Roy Chowdhury, a dealer who possesses seven paintings by Tagore, besides an extensive collection of documents, manuscripts and other Tagore memorabilia, would not sell "even a scrap of paper" because he senses that the prices are on a steeply upward curve now.
Of the 3,000-odd paintings that Tagore had done in the last four decades of his life (1901-1941), a little over 2,000 are to be found in the catalogues of various museums of the world, the lion's share of course being accounted for by Visva-Bharati, the university founded by the poet-painter, whose museum has 1,600 of them.
Though 1,000 paintings are now held by private collectors, many of whom had family associations with Tagore and often got the paintings gratis, very few have a chance to surface now—such being the fierce pride in their acquisition. Since 1985, no Indian museum has been able to identify potential buys because of the price factor.
The most recent purchase of privately-held Tagore paintings was made by Rabindra Bharati museum, located in Tagore's ancestral house at Jorasanko in old Calcutta, when it acquired two of them late in 1984—one called Faust and the other a landscape—at a price which its curator, Samar Bhowmik, would not disclose. All facts can never be known in the world of art purchase, and dealers hide the names of potential buyers till the last moment. But a museum in Bombay, owned by a large industrial house, is believed to have paid an "earnest money" of Rs one lakh to a dealer in Calcutta to identify and acquire on its behalf a modest collection of Tagore paintings at "any price".
The popularity of Tagore is not altogether a freak phenomenon accountable only by the passing vagaries of art connoisseurs. Says celebrity painter M.F. Husain: "Even though Picasso had painted a lot of child art late in his life, it was essentially cerebral painting. But Tagore as a painter had a pristine quality about him—something unprecedented in the history of art."
The famous erasures in Tagore manuscripts began as early as 1874, when he was only 13, but his most intense phase as a painter started with his exposure in the early 1920s to the Bauhaus painters—Wassily Kandinsky, Lionel Feininger and Paul Klee. He absorbed contemporary western influences and created what is regarded as a one-man genre.
It is this distinctiveness which perhaps explains the phenomenon of the rising prices. "Add to that," says Roy Chowdhury, "the aura of a poet of world renown, the age to which he belonged, and the fact that he being a dead artist, there is a natural limitation on the number of his available paintings."
Meanwhile, forgers have started cashing in on the new demand. Bhowmik was approached last year with two portraits, allegedly by Tagore, for which a suspiciously modest price was asked. A close check of the paper showed that it did not carry the obligatory monogram of Visva-Bharati, nor did the signatures at the back tally with Tagore's own which changed with the passing years so regularly that one can always place them in time provided they are genuine.
But by the time the two paintings were established to be fake, the fly-by-night dealer had disappeared. Roy Chowdhury says the fake Tagore paintings have a burgeoning market in middle class homes whose owners would buy the stuff knowingly, "in the spirit of buying a copy". But the price of even a crude copy—it is not easy to imitate Tagore's spontaneous lines—has soared to Rs 2,500 or around if the buyer is conscious of what he is buying; otherwise the tag can be even higher.
The estimate of 3,000 paintings are based mostly on versions of close Tagore-watchers and his personal staff and friends. But Bhowmik agrees that "there may be a lot of paintings freely afloat in private homes". Except a few well-known private collections, like the Sarabhais' in Ahmedabad or industrialist B.K. Birla in Calcutta, no individuals are known to possess Tagore paintings in any large numbers.
The last collector to sell in bulk was Nirmal Kumari Mahalanabis, widow of the statistician P.C. Mahalanabis, who parted with all her 37 paintings—often for a song—in the four years between 1977 and 1981. Those who dealt in the Mahalanabis collections now repent having allowed them to pass into collectors' hands without anticipating the rise in the prices.
In the art market, spiralling offers often push the paintings under the carpet until the bids plateau off at a high level. "Tagore paintings are passing through a period of speculative hoarding," says Bannerjee. But, even at the present level of bidding, Tagore far outstrips Abanindranath Tagore, Nandalal Bose and Jamini Roy—all celebrated masters of the Bengal school—whose works are continuously changing hands at prices well within the Rs 5,000 to Rs 10,000 range.
The last exhibition of Tagore paintings was held in Calcutta in April 1983 at the Birla Academy of Art and Culture in which 50 collections, all drawn from the repertoire of private collectors, were on display. Though bringing out in the open only a fraction of the paintings and sketches that are privately held, it gave a fair indication about the current owners.
Maitreyi Devi, novelist, essayist and an associate of the poet, had seven paintings on display; the owners of the Ananda Bazar group of papers had 14; Roy Chowdhury had six; Bannerjee had his lone possession as an entry; Birla himself had four; dealer Dilip Roy had six; and the Academy 11. Of the two entries from Nihar Ranjan Chakraborty, a well-known city businessman, the one that is considered priceless is the portrait of Kadambari Devi, wife of the poet's elder brother who had committed suicide leaving a void which literary critics have often traced to his later works.
Museologists say there is no way of knowing how many of the sketches and paintings Tagore had gifted away and how many of those painted during his long sojourns abroad have still been lying outside the country. It was only last year that the Rabindra Bharati Museum acquired from West Germany a 1935 portrait by Tagore of Mussolini, the fascist leader, drawn with a ringing satirical force which is quite uncharacteristic of him. The British Museum has a dozen of his paintings, all acquired from non-Indian sources.
But, as a collector says, "it is the Bengali elite of Tagore's lifetime, connected to him in the social circuits, which has the lion's share". And, at the rate their prices are spiralling, the full scope and value of Tagore's artistic endeavours might finally be forced out into the open.
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