Soho... Tagore the Rebel Artist

Pioneer of a school that relies on sense and spirit to penetrate to the inner emotions

Last month Beirut was visited by the well-known Indian painter and writer Soho Tagore, grandson of the greatest poet Rabindranath Tagore, to organize the exhibition "Indian Art Through the Ages," which will be held in the UNESCO hall in Beirut to develop cultural relations between India and Lebanon and to strengthen the bonds of thought between them.

Soho Tagore selected the exhibits of this show from various parts of India, and comprehensively, so as to include what represents both modern art and ancient.

"I strive to capture the many-shaped emotions of the human heart by means of balanced lines and harmonious colors, and through my drawings I aim to unfurl the banner of many-shaped feelings within the bounds of beauty of form."

In these words Soho Tagore explains his artistic doctrine.

And Soho Tagore is not merely an artist; he is a pioneer who walked a rugged path along which he broke away from the bonds of the two spiritualities, the Eastern and the Western, so as to be the more eloquent in expressing the spirit of atmospheres, and to penetrate as deep as may be into the natures of things, making of line a tone and of color a melody, within a frame of harmony that surrounds the window his art opens upon the deep inner world.

We stand, then, before a new pictorial school that relies on feeling and spirit without neglecting the material nature of line and the rules of color; and before an artist who has absorbed the artistic doctrines, rich in knowledge, joining the qualities of sentiment to material appearances to deep experience.

This comprehensiveness may not seem strange when we know that Soho Tagore's personality is in itself full, rich in facets and colors and directions.

And yet one can hardly distinguish with ease between Soho Tagore the aristocrat of authentic aristocracy, and Soho Tagore the rebel, the wanderer, the bohemian, rover of horizons... and Soho Tagore the painter, the lyric poet, and the sculptor who makes of the deaf rock a speaking melody.

In the thick of his roaming through the cities of the West he kept producing, concentrating his efforts now on this art, now on that: he composed stories and novels, wrote lyric verse, and composed musical plays that won him a distinguished place in contemporary Bengali literature. He brought out a number of literary and artistic journals, carved in stone and engraved in wood — but before all else he painted pictures of astonishing importance.