Character artist anu radha10/29/2022 ![]() ![]() When they met, Spies had just begun living in Bali, where he became the central figure in its art, music, archaeology. Tagore aspired to bring the world to Santiniketan and travelled tirelessly in its cause. A deep involvement and interest in other cultures, art. ![]() What both represent, very strongly, is the spirit of cosmopolitanism - of the genuine kind. What sort of spirit do artists like them represent? The other artist, who also combined a love for nature and curiosity about the world, and is a character in this novel, is Rabindranath Tagore. It made me feel he was an inspiring figure for contemporary times. He spent six years of his brief life in jail for political reasons, and yet remained spiritedly creative. He died when he was being sent as a prisoner of war (ironically, to India) on a ship that was sunk by Japanese bombs. ![]() He planned to come to India but that was never to be. He was a fascinating character, a genius of a kind, who was an equally brilliant pianist, painter, linguist, who made Bali his home. Fictionally speaking, Walter Spies’s life is very dramatic and a symbol of both humanism and cosmopolitanism, and the waste and destruction brought about by war, hatred, prejudice. This, apart from the paintings themselves, somehow made me feel we had a connection. When I was still trying to get closer to the boy, I remember standing in a museum in Bali before the paintings of Walter Spies, and I discovered he died on January 19, the very day my beloved old dog had died, only a few months earlier. At what point did the 20th century German artist Walter Spies enter the narrative? ![]()
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