New Delhi: Eminent Indian painter and former Rajya Sabha MP Jogen Chowdhury died on Sunday morning (October 25) in Kolkata, after more than a year of fighting blood cancer. He was 87.“He was diagnosed over a year ago, but the fighter that he was, he fought back,” gallerist Somak Mitra of Art Exposure told The Indian Express. “He was admitted to the hospital in Shoshti (October 16) and passed away this morning after an infection,” he said.Chowdhury, who became popular in the 1960s, is celebrated for his distinctive style that seamlessly blends traditional Indian aesthetics with modernist sensibilities. He worked across several mediums. He mostly lived and worked from Shantiniketan.Art Exposure, which represented him, describes him as someone who “combined the elements of line texturing into forms of agony and vulnerability”, particularly with the emergence of a new phase of modern Indian art in the 60s.“Jogen Chowdhury [was] a non-typical artist in many ways. He preferred to work mostly in pastels, water color and ink instead of oil-painting and went on to develop a visual idiom rooted in the Indian ethos and more specifically Bengal ideology. Jogen Chowdhury’s personal style can also be understood as a natural consequence of his own affinity with the organic energies of life manifested in nature and an incisive observation of the social life around,” the gallery states.He graduated from the Government College of Art & Craft, Kolkata, and subsequently at Ecole Nationale Superieure des Beaux Arts, Paris in the year 1967. A former Trinamool Congress MP, he also served as curator of the art gallery at Rashtrapati Bhavan.According to the daily, before his final rites, the artist will be taken to his home in South City, and to Charubasona, a museum he opened in 2019 to house his life’s works.