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HAREN DAS

Born in 1921 in Dinajpur - a small town in undivided Bengal, now in Bangladesh, Haren Das took a diploma in Fine Art from the Government College of Arts and Crafts, Kolkata. He specialized in graphic arts, besides studying mural painting.

Immediately after graduating in 1938, he joined as a lecturer in his alma mater. He also enrolled in a two-year teacher-training course, where he opted to study graphic art, woodcuts, lithography, and etchings. Das is considered to be one of the finest graphic artists India has ever produced, especially in woodcuts.

Das introduced line engraving and etching into the art curriculum of the Government College of Arts and Crafts, thus laying the foundation for printmaking and graphic art education in India. He once told an art writer, "Just as a poet or musician expresses his emotions and his interpretations of life through words and sounds, an artist visualizes the phenomenal world around him in the receptacle of his mind and expresses it in color and form. But an artist who is obsessed with woodcuts sees life through a special point of view and must work with light and shade, composing them into a picture and adapting his medium to the presentation."

Most of his works, especially his woodcuts and engravings, captured rural, pastoral Bengal. Despite using restraint and economy, Das has managed to offer a glimpse of a Bengal that no longer exists. Most of his work is a nostalgic reflection of a childhood and a youth spent at Dinajpur. In his works, the artist depicts man as part of nature, an individual who lives in harmony with the elements surrounding him. His works talk of cobbled streets, buffaloes, the village well, women with pots on their heads...

A winner of several national awards, Das held several one-man shows and group shows across India. His works are in the collections of the National Gallery of Modern Art, New Delhi, the Calcutta Art Gallery, and many other state galleries. In 1950, he published a book of engravings titled `Bengal Village in Wood`.

Haren Das died in Kolkata in 1968.