Jogen Chowdhury, one India’s leading modern painters whose figurative oeuvre foregrounded humanity, died at a hospital in Kolkata on October 25. He was 87. Indian media reports that Chowdhury had been suffering from a rare blood cancer for more than a year.

Condolences have poured in on social media in the wake of his death. Writing on X, West Bengal chief minister Suvendu Adhikari praised Chowdhury as a “a towering pillar of our cultural world,” whose artistic legacy would be “immortal through the ages.” Likewise Samir Aich, a prominent painter based in Kolkata, mourned his death as “personal loss” and representative of a chapter closing on the Bengal School of Art, an early 20th-century art movement that originated in Kolkatta (formerly Calcutta) and Shantiniketan during the British Raj, and then flourished across the Indian subcontinent, buoyed by the Indian Independence Movement.