Jogen Chowdhury

Jogen Chowdhury was one of modern India's most singular artistic voices — a painter whose fluid, unbroken line and dense cross-hatching gave human figures a psychological intensity unlike anything else in contemporary Indian art. Born on February 16, 1939, in Daharpara village, Faridpur district (now in Bangladesh), he grew up in a home steeped in creative tradition: his father, Pramathanath Chowdhury, painted Hindu mythological subjects, and his mother, Indudevi, practised alpana, the ancient art of decorative floor and wall painting. The Partition of 1947 uprooted the family and brought them to Kolkata, an experience that carved itself deep into Chowdhury's artistic consciousness — a lifelong preoccupation with human vulnerability, displacement, and the frailty of the body. He enrolled at the Government College of Art and Craft in Kolkata in 1955, graduating five years later with a gold medal in watercolour painting. Working by kerosene lamplight in the evenings and sharing that light with his younger siblings, he pursued his studies with fierce dedication. In 1965, a French government scholarship took him to the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris, where he absorbed European modernism while never abandoning his roots in the Bengal School and the Kalighat pat tradition. Returning to India, Chowdhury rose steadily through the country's art institutions — designer at the Handloom Board in Kolkata, Curator of the Art Gallery at Rashtrapati Bhavan in New Delhi from 1972 to 1987, and then Professor of Painting at Kala Bhavan, Visva-Bharati, Santiniketan, where he spent the final decades of his career. He co-founded Gallery 26 and the Artists' Forum in New Delhi in 1975, mentored younger painters — often buying their work to encourage them — and in 2019 opened Charubasona, a five-storey museum in Kolkata dedicated to his lifetime of work. From 2014 to 2020 he also served as a member of the Rajya Sabha, carrying an artist's conscience into Parliament. Married to Sipra Chowdhury in 1970, he carried a small camera in his pocket wherever he went, quietly documenting the world around him. He battled myeloproliferative neoplasm for fourteen months before passing away on October 25, 2026, at a private hospital in Kolkata, aged 87. He leaves behind a body of work that will endure — and a generation of artists shaped by his generosity and the unmistakable authority of his line.