India's First Cubist Was a Tagore You've Never Heard Of
While Europe argued about Cubism, a self-taught Bengali was quietly doing it too — and using the same brush to mock his own snobbish class.
The Tagore family produced a Nobel laureate (Rabindranath) and the father of the Bengal School (Abanindranath). The third major artist among them, Gaganendranath, tends to get left off the family flyer. He shouldn't be.
He came to painting late, taught himself, and then did something no other Indian artist had: he took up Cubism. The historian Partha Mitter flatly calls him the only Indian painter before the 1940s to use the language of Cubism.
His fractured dream-cities — Dwarkapuri, Swarnapuri — splinter light and architecture into crystalline planes. And here is the kicker: he first showed this work at the 1922 Bauhaus exhibition in Calcutta, hanging beside Klee and Kandinsky.
A self-taught Bengali, exhibiting Cubist paintings next to the European avant-garde, in Calcutta, in 1922. The centre of modern art was not quite where everyone assumed.
He had a second weapon, too: satire. His lithograph albums skewered hypocritical priests, the caste system, and the pompous English-educated elite — his own class. India's first serious political cartoonist was a gentleman roasting gentlemen.
A stroke around 1930 ended his painting. He has been quietly underrated ever since — which, for a man who spent his career puncturing reputations, is a slightly cruel joke.
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