As an artist-ideologue, Jagdish Swaminathan enjoys the pole position in the universe of modern Indian art. He is best remembered as an ideologue, creator of the Roopankar Museum of the multi-arts complex of Bharat Bhavan in Bhopal, and the most prominent advocate of tribal art of India.
Born in Shimla on June 21, 1928, Swaminathan or Swami, as he was popularly known, tried his hands at widely disparate professions. Despite showing an early proclivity for the arts, he joined a medical course in New Delhi only to leave it for politics. He joined the Congress Socialist Party, and then the Communist Party of India, and worked as a social activist, a journalist and a writer of short stories. It was in the mid-1950s that he found his footing in the arts.
Swaminathan studied at Delhi Polytechnic briefly, and then went to Poland on a scholarship to study at the Academy of Fine Arts, Warsaw.
His lifelong work was informed by his exploration of the relationship between colour and space, which resulted in his well-known series of works such as Colour Geometry of Space, the Bird, Mountain, Tree series, and more. His works continue to remain popular as recent auction prices show.
In the early 1980s, while setting up the Roopankar Museum, he strongly nurtured tribal art of Madhya Pradesh, giving it national recognition through his discovery, the late Gond artist, Jangarh Singh Shyam.
Swaminathan moved back to New Delhi at the opening of the 1990s, where he passed away on April 25, 1994.