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Abanindranath Tagore
Accession No . 1160
Artist Name. Abanindranath Tagore
Title. Badshah-Sa-Alam
Medium. Wash and tempera on paper
Size. 7" x 9.875"
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This painting by Abanindranath Tagore depicts an old Mughal emperor ‘Badshah-Sa-Alam’ sitting in his chamber and looking up towards the calligraphy on the wall. The background reveals an interior space, with floral marble inlay work, similar to the kind of work seen in Mughal architecture. Rendered with tempera delineating the forms and adding life to the painting. During this phase of painting, Abanindranath Tagore revisited the Mughal visual idiom in pursuit of the 'authentic' as well as an 'identity' in his rejection of the colonial art practice. Abanindranath's inner urge for liberating Indian art was further inspired by Okakura, a great Japanese artist and art-critic who came to India with Swami Vivekananda. His work has a great delicacy of feeling, unity of concept, a highly sensitive range of color, tone, texture and poetic depth. His work was a mixture of traditionalism and innovation. He aimed at comparing nature in its transient forms and produce an image part object, part sensuous, both transposed into each other. But his vision on nature was always poetic, as was his personal form of expression.
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