‘In the 1920s and early 1930s he was at the peak of his fame,’ says Vesey, ‘and I think he very much capitalised on that, wanting to spread his ideas and reach as many people as possible. He felt that his art was able to express something that his writing could not, and having a big exhibition in the thriving art scene of Paris, and then across Germany, would have maximum impact.’ It was in Germany that Untitled (Couple) was bought by a member of the Rathenau family, who are now selling it. Tagore had received no formal training as an artist and many of his paintings started as notebook doodles, which he then worked up either into complex abstract forms or into images of birds and animals that had, as he put it, ‘unaccountably missed [their] chance of existence’. He gave the impression that these works were achieved almost spontaneously, by exploiting the unconscious and the accidental. His paintings of people, such as Untitled (Couple), were also done from the imagination rather than from life, painted in a style that Vesey describes as ‘flat, non-naturalistic or naïve’.
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