Abanindranath Tagore

Abanindranath Tagore (Calcutta, 1871 – 1951) was an Indian painter and writer working in Bengali, and one of the founders of modern painting in India. He belonged to the influential Tagore family of Calcutta and was a nephew of the poet Rabindranath Tagore. He is best known for leading the Bengal school of art, a movement that sought to renew Indian painting against the European models taught in art schools under British rule.

He was born in the Jorasanko district of Calcutta into a family of artists, since his grandfather and his elder brother, Gaganendranath, also painted. He studied at the Sanskrit College and then at the Calcutta School of Art, where European teachers introduced him to pastel and oil. Around 1897 he trained in the European academic manner, with a particular fondness for watercolour, and began to take an interest in Mughal painting, which shaped his works on the life of Krishna. After meeting E. B. Havell, he helped to reshape art teaching in Calcutta.

Tagore held that Western art was materialistic and that India had to return to its own traditions to recover its spiritual values. He drew on Mughal painting and on Whistler's aestheticism, and in his later work he absorbed Chinese and Japanese calligraphy. His series based on the Arabian Nights, painted in 1930, uses those tales to look at colonial Calcutta and its cosmopolitan character. He kept in touch with the art historian Okakura Kakuzō and the painter Yokoyama Taikan, whose work resembled his own.

As a writer for children, his books Rajkahini, Buro Angla, Nalak and Khirer Putul are counted among the landmarks of Bengali children's literature. Among his students, Nandalal Bose became especially well known. For decades much of his work stayed in storage at the Rabindra Bharati Society, which delayed its public recognition. Recent studies by R. Siva Kumar and Debashish Banerji have reassessed it, and in 1942 he became chancellor of Visva Bharati.