In Reminiscences of a Dream (1969), three forms float against a darkness that seems to have no end: a sunflower, its head half-visible like a setting sun; a fish turned belly-up; and a snake suspended above them. Nothing connects the three according to the logic of the waking world. The snake does not threaten the fish; the fish does not appear to have fallen from anywhere. The sunflower, fish and snake simply coexist, as things do in dreams, before the mind restores the order of things.Chowdhury painted this work shortly after returning from Paris, as he began moving away from academic figuration towards a more inward, psychological language. The forms remain recognisable, but the space around them refuses classification. There is no horizon, no ground on which to stand, no reliable measure of distance. We know what we are looking at, but cannot quite say where we are. The painting holds us in that interval between seeing and understanding.‘Reminiscences of a Dream’. Photo: AstaGuruJogen Chowdhury, who died on October 25, 2026, possessed a rare ability to make the familiar strange without making it unrecognisable. His figures belong to the world we inhabit, with its awkwardness and vulnerability, but seem to carry another world within themselves. Their bodies are records of experience, repositories of desire and loneliness. The lines that describe them do more than outline a form; they register the pressure of being alive.Chowdhury spoke of his lifelong attention to people, their gestures and facial expressions, and of his capacity to feel their agony and happiness. His figures are distorted, but distortion here is not a departure from reality. It is a way of getting closer to it. He also acknowledged that he deliberately altered the line, colour and tone of the forms he observed, taking them beyond straightforward realism. A shoulder swells, a limb bends, a face seems to fold in upon itself. The body becomes an unstable territory, shaped by physical and psychological forces. What might initially appear grotesque gradually becomes intimate.The cross-hatched lines that came to define much of his work are central to this transformation. They can resemble folds of skin, the texture of cloth, the surface of an object or the movement of a thought. Each line deepens the drawing’s texture, lending the figure a presence that seems to arise from the paper itself. The distinction between what is represented and how it is represented begins to dissolve.Darkness performs a similarly complex function. It suspends time, removes the familiar coordinates of place and allows incompatible realities to coexist. In works such as the Bakasur paintings, we cannot always tell whether we are looking at a mythological episode, a historical scene or something belonging to the present. The darkness withholds the information that would settle the question. We are left to confront what is there without the protection of a definitive narrative.‘His figures are distorted, but distortion here is not a departure from reality.’ A painting by Jogen Chowdhury.Looking back at his 2013 retrospective at Nandan Art Gallery in Santiniketan, I remember how revealing it was to encounter works from different periods together. The exhibition offered a view of an artistic life not often available to the artist himself. Chowdhury told me that it was probably the first time he had looked at his entire body of work in this way, and that the experience had allowed him to introspect. There was something moving about this admission. The artist who had spent decades looking so intently at the world was, for a moment, looking at the accumulated evidence of his own looking.What emerged was a practice less divided than one might have expected. The figures and objects, the sensual and the decorative, the intimate and the enigmatic arose from a shared sensibility. Even the flowers and vases, those seemingly quieter presences in his work, possessed an intensity that unsettled their apparent stillness. A flower could become monumental; a vessel could acquire the gravity of a living form. Chowdhury often brought us so close to an object that we ceased to see it as familiar. Its surface became an event.Perhaps this attentiveness had roots in the domestic world of his childhood: his father’s sketches and portraits of domestic workers, his mother’s decorative motifs on pillow covers and alpanas. Such details cannot explain an artist, but they suggest how looking begins, in the ordinary arrangements of a life. Born in Faridpur, in present-day Bangladesh, Chowdhury came to Calcutta with his family following Partition. He studied at the Government College of Art and Craft before travelling to Paris on a French government scholarship. There, he studied at the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts and worked at Stanley William Hayter’s Atelier 17, where he encountered the possibilities of printmaking.‘In works such as the Bakasur paintings, we cannot always tell whether we are looking at a mythological episode, a historical scene or something belonging to the present.’ A painting by Jogen Chowdhury.In 1972, he moved to Delhi to become Keeper of Art at Rashtrapati Bhavan, a position he held until 1987. That year, he moved to Santiniketan to teach painting at Kala Bhavana, Visva-Bharati, eventually becoming Professor of Painting and principal. He retired in 1999 and continued as Professor Emeritus. His years at Kala Bhavana brought him into sustained engagement with the Indian artistic inheritance, while his training in Paris had exposed him to European modernism. He drew on these experiences without allowing either tradition to prescribe what his work should become.The sensuality of Chowdhury’s paintings belongs to the same independence. His figures inhabit a world of uncertain relationships, where tenderness and unease are often difficult to distinguish. Desire is present, but rarely offered as uncomplicated pleasure. The body is at once a source of delight and a site of exposure. His women possess a presence that resists easy categorisation; his men often seem burdened by the marks of the world they have inhabited. The private is inseparable from the social. The body carries history even when the painting refuses to identify a particular time or place.Chowdhury belonged to a generation whose consciousness was shaped by famine, communal violence, Partition and the political upheavals that followed. These events did not always enter his work as direct illustration. Their presence could be more elusive: a disquiet in the figure, a darkness without a clear source, a world in which human beings appear estranged from themselves and one another. His art understood how history enters the body, the home, the relationship between two people and the silences that gather around them.In Partition 1947 (2017), this history becomes explicit. The Radcliffe Line cuts through the painting, separating things that had belonged together: the hilsa fish and the Durga idol, familiar presences in the life of Bengal. Displaced people move from East Bengal towards Calcutta, carrying what they can as they search for shelter. The line enters the fabric of everyday life, dividing a shared world.In a later conversation, when I interviewed him about his notebooks and writings, what struck me was the breadth of his thinking. We spoke about perception, distortion, abstraction, music and the relationship between form and feeling. He could move from the concentrated energy of Indian sculpture to Beethoven, from the Bhagavad Gita to the problem of how a line might contain something larger than itself. He was interested in how the small could hold the large, how a fragment might suggest an entirety that could never be fully grasped. Art, for him, was a way of thinking through the contradictions of existence.Jogen Chowdhury. Photo: Siddharth Sivakumar.He was equally concerned about the conditions in which art was made and encountered. He wrote and spoke about criticism, public art, art education and the danger of allowing fashion or the market to determine artistic value. He wanted art to enter everyday life and change how we inhabit and understand our surroundings.This conviction found expression in the institutions and platforms he helped build and sustain. Chowdhury’s contribution to Bengal’s art world extended well beyond his own practice. Through his leadership of the Rajya Charukala Parshad, his editorship of ArtEast, and his involvement in initiatives such as the Santiniketan Society of Visual Art and Design and KMOMA, he strove to create spaces where artists could work, exhibit, exchange ideas, and find audiences. In 2019, he opened Charubasona in Kolkata as a permanent home for a representative body of his own work, extending public access to an artistic journey that had unfolded over decades. He understood that an art world could not thrive on individual achievement alone; it needed places where artists could meet, ideas could be tested, and younger practitioners could find room to develop.When the Bengal Biennale was still an idea taking shape, Jogen-da was one of its sounding boards and guiding presences. At a planning meeting in June 2023, discussions ranged across possible venues, institutional partnerships, curatorial approaches and public programmes. He was interested in the practical questions through which an idea becomes an institution. Even as a Member of Parliament, he brought teachers from Kala Bhavana together and asked them how art education in schools could be improved. Politics drew him for a time into another arena, but his concern for the conditions of art remained. He wanted it to live beyond the studio.There was something unmistakably Bengali middle-class about his manner: the kurta-pyjama, the winter cap, the shawl and Nehru jacket; an unostentatious presence that evoked a generation of artists and intellectuals for whom seriousness did not require spectacle. Even as his work brought him considerable success, his habits and manner of life seemed largely unchanged. Money did not become a display of status; he did not feel the need to advertise his achievements. The contrast between his growing stature and his unaltered manner was striking: recognition came his way, but it did not seem to change the way he lived.There was a quiet generosity in the way Jogen-da approached his work. I remember hearing of an art camp he could not attend because of ill health, but for which he nevertheless made a substantial work. Even in his absence, he found a way to contribute.In my own case, that generosity took a more personal form. After reading a review I had written of his retrospective at Nandan in 2013, Jogen-da jokingly told my father, “Your son writes better than you.” I was then struggling to emerge from the shadow of a father with an established intellectual reputation, uncertain whether I would ever find my own place. Jogen-da could not have known how much that sentence would stay with me. I suspect many others carry their own such moments: a word or gesture from him that took on a meaning he may never have fully known.It is difficult not to reflect, then, on the relationship between artistic stature and official recognition. Chowdhury’s work had earned its place in the history of Indian art long before his death; his contribution as a teacher, institution-builder and mentor had touched generations of artists. Yet the highest national honours do not always seem to follow the measure of a life’s achievement. Their absence can say as much about the judgement of those who confer them as it does about the person overlooked. That Chowdhury’s stature required no official validation is precisely what makes the question of such recognition worth asking.The institutions Jogen-da helped build will have their histories, recording what he set in motion and what others carried forward. But his advice and encouragement to individuals will continue to take shape in ways no institutional history can record, growing alongside one another, independently, often in ways no one could have anticipated.I return to Reminiscences of a Dream. Nearly six decades after it was painted, the sunflower, the fish and the snake still refuse to explain their presence together. They remain where he placed them, on a dark screen floating ceaselessly, continuing to evolve with each new spectator who encounters them across changing times.Siddharth Sivakumar has studied English literature and writes regularly on visual art and culture for print and online publications.