Hot on the heels of the show of Bob Dylan’s paintings at the Gagosian, there’s a show of Rabindranath Tagore’s drawings at the Asia Society Museum.  The great Bengali poet and novelist, who died in 1940, is revered both in India and abroad as a pivotal cultural figure, who linked his country’s enormous, mythological past with a free and independent future.  I find what poetry of his that I’ve read in translation a bit sentimental, and his image self-consciously exotic, as if it were designed to please a westerner’s idea of a mystic.  I’ve always preferred the face that Jawaharlal Nehru presented for India – one of refinement and modernity.

Tagore began drawing and painting late on life, when he was 63.  (The show is called Late Harvest.)  There’s no denying his passion for the media.  He completed over 2,500 works before he died.  Some are vivid graphically, with a palette of inky blacks and surreal earth-tones.  But there’s little spatial and emotional complexity in them, and they feel more like illustrations than drawings.  Because many feature naturalistic figures in flattened backgrounds, and have a dreamy, symbolic cast, they reminded me of drawings by Francesco Clemente.  But Clemente’s drawings are erotically and mythologically charged.  They seem naive at first glance and then pull you deep inside.  Tagore’s drawings are simply appreciated and forgotten.