From the Collection

Horrifying News. “Two soldiers were caught fishing in the sacred river near Hardwar.” | Gaganendranath Tagore | Lithograph | 1917 | Swaraj Collection

Confusion of ideas | Gaganendranath Tagore | Lithograph | 1917 | Swaraj Collection

My love of my country is as big as I am | Gaganendranath Tagore | Lithograph | 1917 | Swaraj Collection

“To be drunk and sober, not in different moments, but at once in the same moment—this is the secret of true poetry…” – Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling

“And what is true of poetry is also true of art.” – Mulk Raj Anand

“Through the presentation of his feelings and ideas there emerges a style in the drawings which is almost the cumulative attitude of Gaganendranath towards art. In spite of the variety of moods and the changes of attitude, there arises a total attitude towards drawing which absorbs the didactic element of his content into a coherent technique. And although the artist was to change his style in his various experiments in colour later on, the cartoons did not show any ambivalence in the whole process by which Gagan Babu took the world into himself and then spat it out. Therefore the style of cartooning associated with Gaganendranath occupies a uniquely individual position in the history of caricature in our country.” – Mulk Raj Anand

Lithographs from “The Realm of the Absurd” by Gaganendranath Tagore | 1917 | Swaraj Collection