Head of a Woman

Rabindranath Tagore is a Nobel Laureate known for his poetry. Tagore’s interest in art came to the fore during the later half of his life as he began painting when he was in his sixties, during this period between the years 1928 and 1940, Tagore produces over 2000 pieces. Though he did not paint for as long as he wrote, his art has been considered to be deeply impactful. The artwork in question is a part of a recurring series that dealt with the female form known as the female “head studies.” This series is considered by many who study Tagore’s art to be part of his most psychologically resonant work. Tagore uses a multi-chromatic scheme to paint the woman's face. The face in the painting is offset to the left of the plane and Tagore fills the negative space with hues of green, ochre and dull pink. This is in tandem with Tagore's recurring formal vocabulary of angular geometry, smooth upward-thrusting shapes and gaunt ovoid heads. It appears that for Tagore, these forms became strangely imbued with the expression of deep psychic pain and scholars trace this expressionist motif specifically through his repeated depictions of the ovoid-faced, desolate women. The oval faced woman that appears in this painting seems to be a subject Tagore returns to frequently. She first appeared in 1930 and then continued to appear many times after this. Her early versions were soft and glowing and the ones that were painted later on became more intense, with a bright forehead and sharp nose, creating a sense of gloom. Scholar Tapati Gupta tries to understand this painting by contextualizing them within the scope of Tagore's views on women and beauty. To him, women held a stronger "vital power" than men and beauty was just a form of expression and not something that could be measured or mapped. Gupta goes on to argue that this belief pushed him away from realistic styles like that of Ravi Varma's and toward more expressive and distorted forms.