Art Exhibition in India Stirs Controversy

Art critics have criticized a government art exhibition, featuring works from Indian Nobel Laureate Rabindranath Tagore, saying the paintings are fake.

The Government Art and Craft College in Kolkata opened on February 27th to commemorate the 150th anniversary of Tagore, who is revered by Bengalis as a mentor.

The exhibition included both Tagore’s paintings and some of his unpublished works of literature.

However, experts say that Tagore was an untrained painter and his style reflected those artistic traits clearly. Art critic Pranab Ranjan Roy believes the exhibited paintings are fake.

[Pranab Ranjan Roy, Art Critic]:
"I can vouch for it, that in stylistic and technical details, the exhibited paintings do not match Tagore's known works."

Ranjan Roy said that being a College of Art, the organizers ought to have looked into several facts regarding Tagore's works and asked for expert opinion.

[Pranab Ranjan Roy, Art Critic]:
"Any institution, which is holding a Tagore exhibition, should have been very careful about these things, about provenance, about details of working out. They may not have in-house expertise even when they are an arts college. They could have asked the expertise from outside, which is available.”

However, the exhibition organizer and principal of the art college, Dipali Bhattacharya, dismissed the criticism, saying that the experts are from the field of literature and not necessarily from fine arts.

[Dipali Bhattacharya, Exhibition Organizer]:
"You know it always happens, you know because the artist is no more and those people who are talking about that, who has given them the credibility to talk about that? Those people who are talking, in my opinion, I have got the same right, my expert committee has got the right also to say that these are good works. It really doesn't matter, this is a wonderful show and people in the town should come, and this show should travel all over."

The exhibition was compiled with help from the museum and a family that was fairly close to Tagore.

Rabindranath Tagore is the face of Bengali literature who also tried his hand at various art forms.

He was the first non-European to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1913.