The painter Jogen Chowdhury, known for expressive figurative drawings, died in a Kolkata hospital on 25 October aged 87, ARTnews reports, drawing tributes from across India's cultural world.
Jogen Chowdhury, one of India's leading modern painters, died at a hospital in Kolkata on 25 October at the age of 87, according to ARTnews. The magazine cites Indian media reports saying he had been suffering from a rare blood cancer for more than a year. Condolences followed on social media: West Bengal chief minister Suvendu Adhikari called him "a towering pillar of our cultural world" whose legacy would be "immortal through the ages", while the Kolkata-based painter Samir Aich described the death as a personal loss and as the closing of a chapter for the Bengal School of Art.
Chowdhury was born on 16 February 1939 in Daharpara village in Faridpur, then part of undivided Bengal, and described a creative upbringing: his mother was known for her Alpana drawings and his father was a painter and sculptor. He enrolled at the Government College of Art & Craft in Kolkata in 1955 and trained there until 1960, later studying at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris in the 1960s before returning to India in 1968. In 1972 he served as a curator at the Art Gallery of Rashtrapati Bhavan, the Indian president's official residence, and in April 2014 he was elected to the Rajya Sabha, India's upper house of Parliament, for the Trinamool Congress, serving until April 2020.
As described by ARTnews, Chowdhury was renowned for his line work, using cross-hatching to delicately distort the human figure, pushing it toward caricature not as mockery but as a way of visualising inner psychological states. The critic R. Siva Kumar wrote that his figures combine "decorative wilfulness and expressive distortion" with an "effusive sensuality". His honours included the Prix de la Jeune Peinture in Paris in 1966, recognition at the Second Havana Biennial in 1986, the Kalidas Samman from the Madhya Pradesh government in 2001 and the Banga Bibhushan, West Bengal's highest civilian honour, in 2012.
