India, Oct. 25 -- Jogen Chowdhury never needed to announce his arrival. In an art world increasingly given to media-manufactured spectacle, bombast and obtuse curatorial prose. Jogen possessed the rare confidence of an artist comfortable in his own skin. His work needed no intellectual scaffolding; it could stand firmly on its own.

Born in Faridpur, in what is now Bangladesh, in 1939, Jogen's early life was shaped by Partition and his family's migration to what was then called Calcutta. He graduated from the Government College of Art and Craft in 1960, before travelling to Paris on a French government scholarship in 1965. His years at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts and William Hayter's Atelier 17 exposed him to European modernism and printmaki...