Somnath Hore (1921-2006), one of the great multi-faceted artists of the 20th century, was remarkable for the consistency and intensity with which he explored human suffering via the techniques of sketching, printmaking and sculpture. Today is his 100th birth anniversary.
Though I was not formally a student of Somnath Hore, from my early student years in Kala Bhavan I was given the precious gift of his lifelong affection. Back in the 1970s, I worked in a studio which was right below his own studio space, and our regular chats under the Bakul tree nearby revealed to me the profoundly emotional and extraordinarily empathetic man behind the now-legendary artist.
As a young man of 22 in Chittagong, Hore had seen the havoc wrought by Japanese bombing and documented the horrors of the devastating Bengal Famine of 1943, which brought about the deaths of 2.1-3 million people. The misery he saw during the famine and the war, and his uncompromising empathy for peoples’ suffering, haunted all the work he did for the rest of his life.
Like many sensitive young men in Bengal in the 1940s, he was an activist of the Communist Party. He learnt how to sketch from the great artist Chittaprasad; his subjects were starving bodies with ribs sharply evident, and hungry children with distended bellies. In 1946, the Party sent him to north Bengal to document the Tebhaga peasant uprising, which again was an influential event in his life. Images of secret meetings and revolutionary inspiration permeate his work of that era, as do images of people’s daily lives. Though he eventually drifted away from the Communist Party, he believed in the philosophy of socialism all his life.
Untitled Woodcut, 1955. Courtesy: Savara Foundation for the Arts
In the 1950s, Hore began exploring the varied world of print-making with curiosity and rigour. In 1958 he took charge of the printmaking department at the Delhi Polytechnic. Now he experimented with etchings, aquatints, intaglios and lithographs. While the art of printmaking was highly advanced in other countries, he did not have too many reference points to lean on around him. He was among the pioneers of this art. Moving on from the political representational figures of his youth, a certain abstraction started appeared in his work now, with his colour intaglios being specially striking.
1962, Ninth Symphony, Print collage.
But after nearly 10 years of working in Delhi, he felt that the capital’s pace of life, and its orientation towards success, was not suitable for his temperament. In 1967, he decided to come back to Bengal. These were not times of a thriving art market and it was a daring decision financially, but completely in keeping with the “Somnath da” I came to know! Thankfully, in 1968, he was offered a chance to head the printmaking department at Kala Bhavana and his quality of life, as well as his work changed further, especially under the influence of the masters Ramkinkar Baij and Benodebehari Mukherjee. The way of life, and the closeness to nature, in Santiniketan suited him very well. He never left Santiniketan and eventually died there.
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With his white-on-white series named ‘Wounds’, he reached a level of minimalism and abstraction such that there is no human depiction at all. He would prepare a clay matrix on which he’d make cuts and gashes, bruising and lacerating the surface, literally creating these ‘wounds’ – which he transferred to the paper that he himself made. It was a direct printing process with no intermediate layers and stages. He was forcing us to face and feel the wound itself.
Wounds, 1972, Pulp print. Courtesy: Prashant Tulsyan
In 1975, he turned to working on wax to cast bronzes. He was in his mid-50s and untrained in the art, but once again he brought a deeply personalised and passionate practice to his new experiments. Deeply moved by the resistance offered by tiny Vietnam to American military might, he created his first sculpture, a nearly-3 feet high depiction of a mother and child, as a tribute.
Shockingly, this work was stolen, never to be found again. Deeply hurt and angry, he never embarked on a sculpture of that scale again. Eventually he did turn to casting bronzes but they were small, palm-sized pieces and he never referred to them as ‘sculptures’, simply calling them ‘bronzes’.
He worked directly on wax, and made no mould by which other copies of the figure could be made. Each effort produced only one unique work of art. The wax on which he directly worked was melted and gone, giving place to the bronze. Yet what he created were tiny icons that depicted epic feeling!
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These are not well-rounded and smoothened figures; they have open surfaces, undisguised holes, and concave surfaces. The hollowness of the bodies is visible and this is integral both to his vision and to his process of sculpting itself. We are seeing the inner life of pain.
Somnath da was the most non-pretentious artist it has been my good fortune to meet. His simplicity spoke through his personality, his clothes, lifestyle, and conversations. He lived in an old building next to Kala Bhavana and after retirement built a mud house near a pond. He was only expressive in his art, otherwise he did not like talking about himself and shied away from the media. He once got on a train to visit Delhi, but got off after a few stations and returned to Santiniketan! He refused the Padma Shri, not wanting to receive an honour from the state (though he was given a Padma Bhushan posthumously).
Cry of the Molested (Rape at Itbhata), Bronze. Courtesy: Samiran Nandy
He never thought of his work as a finished ‘product’ with commercial ‘value’. Nor did he have any sense of his own greatness. During all the years that I knew him, with his colleagues or even with a much younger artist like me, he would be full of questions: “How does one get this patina? What chemicals can be used? What do you think of this piece?” with no sense whatsoever of a senior artist talking to a younger one. It was because of this spirit, and his innovations, that the printmaking departments he set up in Delhi as well as Santiniketan became some of the most significant centres in the country.
Over the years, the form as well as content of his art kept changing but the pain remained, even deepened, and found newer modes of expression. On the one hand, there is no stagnation at all in his creative arc, there is constant evolving from propaganda-oriented woodcuts to etchings, intaglio or colour lithography, to paper pulp and bronze sculpture… But, at the same time, there is never a rupture. There is a continuity in the thread of his thematic and emotional concerns. He will never forget, nor let us forget, that this world stands on the starved concave bodies, the bowed backs, the empty eyes of those whose humanity is denied to them.
Excerpts from an interview with K.S. Radhakrishnan by Juhi Saklani, from the book Somnath Hore, forthcoming, produced by Takshila Museum of Art.