Indian art has lost one of its most distinctive voices. Jogen Chowdhury, the painter whose cross-hatched ink figures captured the anxieties of modern Bengal, died at a private hospital in Kolkata on Sunday, October 25. He was 87. The former Rajya Sabha MP had been battling a rare blood cancer for over a year.
His body was taken to the Rabindra Sadan-Nandan complex on Sunday evening, where admirers, students and fellow artists lined up to pay their last respects.
His final days
According to Ruby General Hospital, Chowdhury had been admitted on October 16 and died at 10:15 am on Sunday. He had been living with a myeloproliferative neoplasm, a rare blood cancer, for about 14 months and was undergoing chemotherapy. A urinary infection further weakened him in his final days.
Jogen Chowdhury at a glance
| Born | 1939, Daharpara village, Faridpur (undivided Bengal, now in Bangladesh) |
| Died | October 25, 2026, Kolkata, aged 87 |
| Training | Government College of Art and Craft, Kolkata; École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts, Paris |
| Rashtrapati Bhavan | Curator of the art collection from 1972 |
| Santiniketan | Professor of painting at Kala Bhavan, Visva-Bharati, from 1987 |
| Rajya Sabha | Trinamool Congress MP from West Bengal, April 2014 to April 2020 |
| Honour | Banga Bibhushan, West Bengal's highest civilian award (2012) |
From Faridpur to Paris
Chowdhury was born in 1939 in Daharpara, a village in Faridpur in what is now Bangladesh. His first lessons in art came at home. His mother was skilled in alpana, the ritual floor drawings of Bengal, and his father painted scenes from mythology. The family moved to Calcutta around the time of Partition, an upheaval that would quietly shape much of his later work.
He trained at the Government College of Art and Craft in Kolkata, graduating in 1960. He then worked as an art teacher at Howrah Zilla School and later as a designer with the Handloom Board in 1962. In the mid-1960s, he went to Paris to study at the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts and worked at the famous printmaking studio Atelier 17.
A style that was his alone
Back in India, Chowdhury slowly developed the language that made his work instantly recognisable: elongated, slightly swollen human figures built out of fine cross-hatched lines in ink, often on a dark or muted ground. His people looked tired, sensual, vulnerable and sometimes grotesque, and they spoke of urban loneliness, political decay and the middle-class Bengali world he knew so well.
He worked across ink, watercolour, pastel and oils, but line remained at the heart of everything. Art lovers often say you could recognise a Jogen Chowdhury drawing from across a room.
Rashtrapati Bhavan and Santiniketan
In 1972, he moved to New Delhi as curator of the art collection at Rashtrapati Bhavan, a role that put him in charge of one of the country's most important public collections. In Delhi he also helped set up Gallery 26 and the Artists' Forum.
In 1987 he joined Kala Bhavan in Santiniketan as a professor of painting. Generations of students there remember him as a gentle but demanding teacher. He kept a home in Santiniketan, and the red earth and open landscape of the region found their way into his later work.
A stint in politics
Chowdhury entered public life in 2014, when the Trinamool Congress sent him to the Rajya Sabha from West Bengal. He served a full six-year term until April 2020. In 2012, the Mamata Banerjee government had honoured him with the Banga Bibhushan.
Tributes from across Bengal
West Bengal Chief Minister Suvendu Adhikari called him an artist of great stature and said his works, including those in government buildings such as Rashtrapati Bhavan, would remain immortal through the ages. Former chief minister Mamata Banerjee described him as the pride of Bengal and India and said his death had left an irreparable void in the world of art and culture.
Fellow painter Samir Aich called it a personal loss and said it marked the end of an era in Indian art. Writer Sirshendu Mukhopadhyay, a close friend for decades, remembered their long adda sessions and said the death was a great loss.
His legacy
For readers who may not follow the art world closely, Jogen Chowdhury belonged to the generation that gave modern Indian art its own identity after Independence. His works hang in major museums and private collections, and a big retrospective at the National Gallery of Modern Art in Bengaluru in 2016 introduced him to a new audience. His students, now teachers and artists themselves, will carry his lessons forward.
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