Jogen Chowdhury

Jogen Chowdhury died at 10.15 am on 25 October 2026 at Ruby General Hospital in Kolkata, aged 87. According to hospital sources, he had been living with a myeloproliferative neoplasm, a rare blood cancer, for about 14 months and had been through several cycles of chemotherapy. He was admitted in critical condition on 16 October, the day of Shashti during Durga Puja, with a urinary tract infection. Sepsis set in, infection spread to his kidneys and lungs, and he was placed on ventilator support on 24 October.

West Bengal Chief Minister Suvendu Adhikari called him a maestro whose distinctive strokes redefined Indian modern art. His gallerist and friend Somak Mitra of Art Exposure, who announced the death to The Indian Express, said he had fought the illness hard. Before the final rites his body was to be taken to his home in South City and then to Charubasona, the arts centre he founded.

Jogen Chowdhury was born on 16 February 1939 in Daharpara, a village in the Faridpur district of undivided Bengal, in what is now Bangladesh. His father, Pramatha Nath Chowdhury, was a landowner with a strong interest in Hindu mythology who painted scenes for the village theatre and sculpted images of deities. His mother was skilled in alpana, the ritual floor drawings of Bengal. He later said he took his love of art from both of them.

Shortly before Partition he came to Calcutta with his father, and the rest of the family followed in 1948. They lived at first in his uncle's quarters, where he painted his first picture on a wall, and in 1951 moved to the Saheednagar colony in Dhakuria. The experience of displacement stayed with him and, critics have argued, shaped the anxious, vulnerable figures of his mature work.

In 1955 he entered the Government College of Art and Craft in Kolkata, graduating in 1960.

After art college Chowdhury taught at Howrah Zilla School and from 1962 worked as a designer for the Handloom Board in Calcutta. In 1965 he went to Paris on a French government scholarship to study at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts and in Stanley William Hayter's printmaking studio, Atelier 17, and then spent five months in London. In 1966 he won the Prix de la Jeune Peinture in Paris.

Returning to India in early 1968, he worked as a textile designer for the Handloom Board in Madras, joined the Calcutta Painters group in 1970 and published his first book of poems the same year. In 1972 he moved to New Delhi as curator of the art collection at Rashtrapati Bhavan, and in 1975 he was among the founders of Gallery 26 and the Artists' Forum. In 1987 he joined Kala Bhavan, the art faculty of Visva-Bharati University in Santiniketan, as professor of painting, where he taught for many years and continued to live and work.

His own style took shape after Paris. Working mainly in ink, watercolour and pastel, he built forms out of fine cross-hatching and rippling contour lines, distorting bodies just enough to give them the air of caricature. Cloth, bolsters, sofas and the human body bleed into one another in his later pictures, carrying themes of sensuality, decay, power and hypocrisy. He represented India at exhibitions abroad, won an award at the second Havana Biennale in 1986 and the International Print Biennale in Bhopal in 1995, and wrote widely on contemporary art. He also designed themes and backdrops for several Kolkata Durga Pujas.

In 2014 he was elected to the Rajya Sabha, the upper house of the Indian Parliament, as a Trinamool Congress member, serving until 2020.

Chowdhury divided his life between Santiniketan, where he kept a studio, and a home in South City in Kolkata. He was a poet as well as a painter and published several books of verse and writing on art. In 2019 he opened Charubasona, the Jogen Chowdhury Centre for Arts, a five storey building opposite South City Mall on Prince Anwar Shah Road, with galleries for his own work from his student days onwards, space for young artists, residencies for art history scholars and a library drawn from his collection.

The writer Shirshendu Mukhopadhyay, a close friend and neighbour, remembered him as open-hearted, simple and without vanity. In his last year, as his illness advanced, he rarely left home or took telephone calls.

Chowdhury is counted among the major figures of Indian modernism, an artist who joined the folk and devotional imagery of rural Bengal to an international modern language of line. His work is held in major collections in India and abroad and is discussed in standard histories of Indian art by Partha Mitter, Geeta Kapur and others. A retrospective was held at the National Gallery of Modern Art in Bengaluru in 2016.

As a teacher at Kala Bhavan for many years, and as founder of Charubasona, he shaped younger artists and gave Kolkata a permanent home for his own work and for the study of art.