Somnath Hore: He Made wounds His Tools and inherited Guernica
Palash Biswas
(Contact: Palash Biswas, Gostokanan, Sodepur, Kolkata- 700110, India. Phone: 033-25659551-r)
He was excellent.He was outstanding in style and aesthetics.He did not believe in abstract.He lived in a real world and sustained his survival with full commitment to his roots, the real india suffering from famine, poverty and imperialism. He began drawing the misery he saw around him, and eventually he was encouraged to make sketches and posters for the Communist Party of India. He returned to Calcutta, where he joined the Government School of Art. He provides an interesting outlook on the definition of artistic originality: "In art nothing is completely original. Heritage, both national and international, is bound to influence an artist either consciously or subconsciously. Art activity mirrors the visible world. Intuitively the artist introduces technical perceptions and innovations which create new forms. These are in turn enriched with fresh concepts. He experimented in a variety of media, including woodcuts, modern gravure, lithography, and extensively in bronze sculpture. He hated famine and poverty. He was not religious .Nor he used religious myths, moods and images in his art. He was dead agaist war and atomic race. He voiced Vietnam. He bore the wounds and at the same time he successfully transformed those wounds in his tools.
The communist, the artist somnath Hore is no more. Let us mourn.
Noted sculptor and winner of Kalidas Samman Somnath Hore died in the night of Navami in Durgotasav after prolonged illness.This timing of his demise is in itself a symbol of his deeprooted existence in Indian soil and its culture. Durgotasav is the greatest cultural and public festival in Bengal across the border. He had been suffering from respiratory problems.
Governor Gopal Krishna Gandhi, also the Visva-Bharati rector, met ailing sculptor Somnath Hore at his Aban Pally house in shantinikatan much before the destined day.Somanth worked for the communist party. He got admission in the art college complying with the suggestion of then Comminst party General secretary PC Joshi. He was a reporter in the communist newspapers. He made posters for the Party. He roamed village after village during Tebhaga movement, the strength of communist movement in Bengal. He was active while the party was banned. He had been in jail. One time, comrade Jyoti Basu was with him in the jail.But it is unfortunate while the rightist Governor had all the time in this world to see the committed ailing artist, the poet Chief Minister of West bengal Bddhadev Bhattacharya, his government and his party never showed any interest unless the time to express condolence hightened.
He is survived by his wife and painter-daughter.
The artist was suffering from lung infection for quite sometime. He was admitted to a local hospital on Friday. He was released from Bolpur hospital on Navami afternoon. But his condition deteriorated at home and he breathed last at 2110 hrs, family sources said.
Somnath Hore is one of the pioneers of the 20th century modern art movement in India. He is respected not only as an important artist but also as a political activist, who has, over the years, boldly used his talents as a graphic artist and sculptor, to express his own personal angst against a socio-political system which breeds acts of violence. The most poignant and powerful statement made by Somnath Hore as an artist, is his pulp print series called “Wounds”. It was the cataclysmic decade of the 1940’s, especially the Bengal Famine of 1943 which shaped and moulded his consciousness as an artist. Somnath has often expressed concern over man’s inhumanity against man and blatant violation of human values—whether it be casteism, communalism, the frightful fallout from nuclear blasts and society’s inability to preserve human dignity.
Born at Srihatta in Chattagram (now in Bangladesh) in undivided Bengal, the sculptor took part in land reform movement. His art basically carried messages of hungry people of the country.
Communist Party of India-Marxist patriarch Jyoti Basu, Lok Sabha speaker Somnath Chatterjee and West Bengal Chief Minister Buddhadeb Bhattacharya mourned the death of the noted sculptor, who started making posters for the Communist party from an early age. They offered condolences to the wife, daughter and other members of Hore's family.
Hore's figures have always reflected the anguished human body, but the imprint of the hand of the creator is more startlingly manifest in his sculptures. The torn and rugged surfaces, rough planes with slits and holes, subtle modelling and axial shifts, exposed channels, all make for exciting visual and tactile sculptures.
Between the years 1954 to 1967, Hore handled a number of jobs in various capacities. From 1954 to 1958 he was a lecturer at the Indian College of Art and Draughtsmanship in Calcutta. Thereafter, till 1967, he held posts like the "in-charge of the Graphic section" at the Delhi College of Art, visiting faculty at the MS University in Baroda and the head of the Graphic Art department of Kala Bhavan, Visva Bharati. In 1960, he became a member of the Society of Contemporary Artists.
Exceptional talent is able to create great art with these tools; and great art is unequivocally original." The Artist: "Wounds", Somnath Hore. 1991.The anguished human form has widely been reflected in Hore's figuration. The visual appeal of his work is increased by the rough surfaces, slits, holes and exposed channels.From 1974, Hore began doing bronze sculptures. "Mother with Child", a large sculpture that paid homage to the people's struggle in Vietnam, was stolen from the Kala Bhavan soon after it was done and has never been traced since. The stealing of Rabidra`s Nobel prize medal and recitation is not the first incident in Shantiniketan. Not at all. Ramkinkar, though had the bless of no less a person than the Gurudev, Ravindra Nath Tagore, had to face all the troubled water as he belonged to lower caste barber. Somnath Hore also did not belong to the elite ruling class of Bengal. Along with Chitto Prasasd and his teacher in the Art College Jainal Abedeen he differed from the much talked Bengal School of Art. His experiments with truth and his commitment alienated him in shantiniketan itself. He enhanced the graphic department of Kalabhavan but it was agnaist the tradition of Shantiniketan. The dominating presence of an artist, a commited one like Somnath Hore was not liked by many. He never bothered with myths and images of gods and godesses. All these things went against him. His works, his colourful simple dresses and his personality , every thing seemed to be agnaist the tradition and environment of Shantiniketan.
He bore the wounds lifelong losing the stolen image of Mother Vietnam , he created. He did not see Vietnam. But no one knew vietnam better than him, not all those who chanted in the procession- AAMAR NAAM TOMAAR NAAM VIETNAM. Somnath faced Japanese Bombing in Patia, Chittagang , his native place. He witnessed and suffered Fmaine of 1943. His visual reportig had been assets of commist party organs Janyudha and People`s Warin those pre independence turmoildays of history. Heis heart bled while Noakhali and Chittagang with and along all the riot torn parts of divided Bengal became killing fields. The refugee influx was his experience. He himself was a refugee in the field of Indian Art, never granted his bonafied citizenship.
Somanth did have no way to be aquainted with Pablo Pccasso and his classic mural Guernica, its style and form. But he sketched all his famine creations in white background with dark black ink creating the same impact of Guernica. His sculpture Holocaust agnaist atomic explosion in Hirosam a and Nagasaki makes us remember nothing but Guernica which is modern art's most powerful antiwar statement... created by the twentieth century's most well-known and least understood artist. But the mural called Guernica is not at all what Pablo Picasso has in mind when he agrees to paint the centerpiece for the Spanish Pavilion of the 1937 World's Fair. Remember those days friends, on April 27th, 1937, unprecedented atrocities are perpetrated on behalf of Franco against the civilian population of a little Basque village in northern Spain. Chosen for bombing practice by Hitler's burgeoning war machine, the hamlet is pounded with high-explosive and incendiary bombs for over three hours. Townspeople are cut down as they run from the crumbling buildings. Guernica burns for three days. Sixteen hundred civilians are killed or wounded.By May 1st, news of the massacre at Guernica reaches Paris, where more than a million protesters flood the streets to voice their outrage in the largest May Day demonstration the city has ever seen. Eyewitness reports fill the front pages of Paris papers. Picasso is stunned by the stark black and white photographs. Appalled and enraged, Picasso rushes through the crowded streets to his studio, where he quickly sketches the first images for the mural he will call Guernica. His search for inspiration is over.
From the beginning, Picasso chooses not to represent the horror of Guernica in realist or romantic terms. Key figures - a woman with outstretched arms, a bull, an agonized horse - are refined in sketch after sketch, then transferred to the capacious canvas, which he also reworks several times. "A painting is not thought out and settled in advance," said Picasso. "While it is being done, it changes as one's thoughts change. And when it's finished, it goes on changing, according to the state of mind of whoever is looking at Three months later, Guernica is delivered to the Spanish Pavilion, where the Paris Exposition is already in progress. Located out of the way, and grouped with the pavilions of smaller countries some distance from the Eiffel Tower, the Spanish Pavilion stood in the shadow of Albert Speer's monolith to Nazi Germany. The Spanish Pavilion's main attraction, Picasso's Guernica, is a sober reminder of the tragic events in Spain.
Somnath Hore, the doyen of Indian printmaking, had a long and illustrious career as an activist, artist, and academic. He deliberately chose to adopt printmaking as his medium. Works like Wounds amply illustrate how he wielded the burin or used the acid on his plates—his was a passionate protest against the wanton violence and devastation that marked his times. Unlike many early printmakers from Santiniketan, it was not merely the novelty of the medium that attracted Hore: he explored it to realise very specific artistic goals. This sense of purpose and passion had not been seen in Indian printmaking, perhaps with the exception of Chittaprosad, who was attracted to the medium because of its reproducibility-quotient, which made it a convenient, wide-reaching vehicle of communication. Hore wanted to bring about a revolution in artistic thought, and not merely explore a new medium. In the 1970s, Hore truly stretched the medium to its limits with his white-on-white pulp prints. He explored new approaches to the medium, liberating it from its traditional technological limits. No longer would printmaking be seen merely as a narrative/illustrative medium/form meant to create works meant for popular circulation. While Hore’s versatility is indeed unparalleled, there were others in the early post-Independence years who contributed significantly to the shaping of the graphic art movement in India. In the 1950s, Delhi seems to have been the fountainhead of pioneering printmaking efforts and initiatives. Not only Hore, but veteran printmakers like Kanwal Krishna and Jagmohan Chopra lived and worked there at that time. Chopra, who was a dedicated teacher, was always open to experimentation—he fostered a generation of printmakers who have been greatly indebted to him. Some of his contemporaries include Gunen Ganguli, Jeevan Adalja, and Zarina Hashmi.
Somnath Hore was born in 1921 in the village of Barama in Chittagong, now in Bangladesh. As a youth, his singular passion was drawing. With a box of watercolors given as a gift, he would try to reproduce images from books and magazines. One day out on the fringes of the village, he saw a pair of painters painting pictures on the inner wall of a room inside a small mud hut. He was fascinated, both by the realism of the images as well as the idea of being able to draw from one's imagination as opposed to copying, as he had been doing. Their ability, he says, "was supernatural to me." Personal and societal circumstances would play a significant role in Somnath's work. His father died when Somnath was but 13; his widowed mother was left to raise 5 children. The great famine of 1943 gave rise to mass starvation and disease.
In the 1950's Somnath Hore was involved, successively, with the Calcutta Corporation as an assistant teacher; with the Indian School of Art; and as a lecturer at the Government College of Art in Delhi. In the decades that followed,
Although contemporary art has used bronze in unconventional ways relevant to the time, the technique is still primarily associated with academic skills and public monuments on a large scale. Its capacity for evoking bodily sensuousness and grandeur was subverted in an intimate manner towards an expression of helpless vulnerability by Somnath Hore in his small images of poverty and suffering. Under the hands of less socially committed artists the classical medium is often used for exercises in Modernistic formalism and token empathy.
A lifetime of inventive experiments with etching, intaglio and lithographs culminated in the abstract while on while Wounds series in 1971. Dramatized with a spot of red, the white on white prints reflected the political turbulence of the times. Prints were taken with paper pulp pressed on molded cement matiices. The moulds were made from originals done in clay.Hore began doing bronze sculptures from 1974 onwards. One of his largest sculptures Mother with Child that paid homage to the spirit of the people's struggle in Vietnam was stolen from the Kala Bhavan soon after it was fmished and disappeared without a trace.
Hore's figuration has always reflected the anguished human body. His sculpture is no different but the imprint of the hand of the creator is more startlingly manifest in his sculptures. The torn and rugged surfaces, rough planes with slits and holes, subtle modeling and axial shifts, exposed channels, all make for exciting visual and tactile sculptures.
The beginning of the 20th century witnessed the rise of the nationalist art ‘movement’—there was a marked shift in the aesthetic preferences of the Indian public at large, leading to the gradual emergence of a group of painters engaged in evolving a fresh, ‘new’ Indian aesthetic. Slowly, distinctions began to arise between ‘committed’ artists and ‘professional’, commercial artists. Soon, artists like Raja Ravi Varma and Bamapada Banerjee began to give way to artists like Abanindranath Tagore and Nandalal Bose.
Gaganendranath Tagore. Metamorphoses. Lithograph from Adbhut Lok. Printed at the Bichitra Studio, Calcutta, by Haricharan Mondal. 1917.
While this transition occurred most evidently in approaches to painting, and later, in approaches to sculpture, printmaking was by no means unaffected. The implications of the distinction between ‘printing’ and ‘printmaking’ slowly began to become clearer, and printmaking as a mode of artistic expression finally began to come into its own. It was only after half a century, that ‘printmakers’ were spoken of as being distinct from painters and sculptors. The beginning of the 20th century saw the emergence of printmaking as an independent art form with a multitude of aesthetic possibilities and an identity of its own.
Moreover, at the beginning of the 20th century, ‘art’ and ‘applied art’ came to be considered, not as two separate spheres, but as two aspects of the same profession. A successful artist was one who had acquired formal training and had inculcated ‘high’ Western aesthetic sensibilities (which would bring him important commissions and employment opportunities).
As more and more Indians began entering art schools, printmaking began to make gradual inroads into the aesthetic consciousness of the educated and intellectual elite at the forefront of the artistic revolution. The greatest thrust, however, came from the Tagore family in Calcutta. The three brothers, Abanindranath, Gaganendranath, and Samarendranath (nephews of Rabindranath Tagore) transformed the south veranda of their Jorasanko residence into an art mecca. They began to host regular art salons and their home became the meeting venue for members of the informal Bichitra Club: this was where new styles of painting and printmaking were explored. Works from the Bichitra Studio (despite the Club’s informal and liberal profile) were highly respected by the educated Bengali middle classes who were increasingly attracted to art as a possible vocation. For the first time, artists such as Gaganendranath Tagore and Nandalal Bose began to practise printmaking as an interventionist activity. Around this time, the art centre set up at Rabindranath Tagore’s new university at Santiniketan began to attract the attention of a new breed of nationalist artists. Abanindranath’s students chose to teach art at the ashram school at Santiniketan, at the Bichitra Studio, and at the Society of Oriental Art, over and above similar jobs at government art schools. In 1920-21, Nandalal Bose became the Principal of the newly founded Kala Bhavana, Santiniketan. It was from here that the graphic art movement in India truly began. By the first quarter of the 20th century, Nandalal Bose had introduced graphic art into the Kala Bhavana curriculum. From 1920-30, he experimented ceaselessly with printmaking practices, seeking a new spontaneous language that was concise, simple, and uncluttered. He understood well the futility of trying to translate Occidentally styled imagery into a traditional Oriental format—the resultant vocabulary would undoubtedly be hybrid and confused. Bose rejected the Western mode of representing three-dimensional space on a flat surface using linear perspective: he developed a personal style that employed a relatively flat perspective (i.e. a two-dimensional view) by evenly distributing positive and negative areas. His prints were crisp, the lines were swift and taut, and the blacks and whites balanced each other perfectly. One could say that Bose’s graphic work bordered on abstraction. Though he had absorbed many influences while developing his unique vocabulary (Far Eastern imagery, classical Indian art, for instance), he broke free of their static conventions. Instead, he developed a highly original syntax – his prints were always lively.
SOMNATH HORE: AN APPRECIATION , Gopal Krishna Gandhi wrote in the Kolkata Daily from
The Nehru Centre, London on June 1995 much before the demise of the artist. The appreciation portrays very weel Somnath Hore. The Governor wrote:
`Chief minister Jyoti Basu is coming to unveil a bust of Tagore sculpted by Somnath Hore and being gifted to the Nehru Centre by the Government of West Bengal. I open the crate that has brought the consignment from Calcutta, with excited anticipation. But when I see the piece, I gasp. We have received a tangle of metal scrap. My colleagues move away from the scene of the de-crating so as not to add their disappointment to their director’s despair.
“There is nothing we can do about it,” I sigh.
We will have to put up the piece and go ahead with the function and ask a colleague to finish the unpacking. An hour or so later, as I happen to walk across the lobby where the opened bronze is now placed on a pedestal, I gasp again — in utter amazement. Tagore stands there, in the perfection of his compassionate intensity.
Tongues of bronze have been inter-folded to form the handsome head. The gently patinated bronze head exudes an inner calm, the hollowed eyes a pain and an understanding of pain. This is a true Tagore head and yet very different. How different? There is such a thing as being true to a subject. There is such a thing as being the subject.
At the function on 7 July, 1995, Jyotibabu unveils the masterpiece (not ‘the piece’ any more) by directing a ray of light on it through the darkened hall. The entire audience draws a collective breath of astonished admiration. All those present have known the Tagore ‘presence’ and yet have not. Not in this aspect.
I was to meet Somnath Hore — for the first time — on 7 November, 1998, in his spartan home tucked behind the foliage that covers the laterite grounds between Santiniketan and Sriniketan. I had accompanied President Narayanan as his secretary on a visit to Visva-Bharati for the birth centenary of Professor Tan Yun-Shan. The function over, I sought and got the President’s permission to deviate from his itinerary to call on the sculptor.
Somnathbabu was at the door to meet me, standing tall like a Painted Stork on stilt-like legs, stooped and lost to thought. Rebadi stood just behind him. He was wearing a sweater though it was not cold, and had his head covered in a hand-knitted woollen affair. There were half-finished clay and wax forms placed on the floor and tables, besides books and plants. As he asked me to take a seat, I was struck by his fingers — unusually long and, strangely, as thoughtful as their owner. They moulded the air while he spoke. I reduced our conversation to writing later that very evening on the back of a sheaf of white paper which I now see was the text of the speech of the then vice-chancellor on Professor Tan.
“When Buddhadeb asked me to do the Tagore bust for your Centre in London, I was hesitant,” he said. “You see, my style is different… I was not sure how people would respond to it….” I told him how right he was about the difference factor and also of how people in London had responded.
In the few minutes available to me in my borrowed time, I asked him about his life, his work. “I started as a printmaker in Kala Bhavan,” he said, reminiscing from a past that seemed not some years old, but a century or more so. I could see that detail mattered to him when to “Kala Bhavan” he added “in the graphics department”.
There was nostalgia but no self-validation, recollecting but no romanticizing. “It is only later that I took to this art form. You see, I first do a wax maquette and then there is a person here who casts it for me in bronze.”
Showing me a specimen, he said: “I do these wax sheets and use these ‘channels’ for the hands and legs….” I understood then how ‘sheets’ and ‘channels’ had gone into the making of the London Tagore.
I asked Somnathbabu whether he had ever met Gandhi or sculpted him. “In 1946, when Gandhiji had come at the time of the riots, I made it a point to follow him wherever he went. Even though I was — and am — not a believer, I attended his prayer meetings because I was fascinated by his personality. I did an engraving but did not sculpt him.”
He then told me of the engraving he had done of Gandhi addressing a Hindu-Muslim congregation in August 1947 at the Mohammedan Sporting Club galleries in Calcutta. This is a remarkable work, showing MKG in the distance, standing like a little matchstick on a far platform, with a multitude of Hindus and Muslims in telltale attire, listening rapt. One listener has a child — his future world — perched on his shoulder, as another in a fez sits with a combination of awe and hope. Difference, again. Somnath Hore was showing MKG not as an iconic superman but as the masses saw him through the hectic jostle of their fears, hopes and emotions.
Somnathbabu seemed at that meeting not just frail but afflicted with a controlled anxiety. He spoke with difficulty, straining at every breath. “I am 77 and a half,” he said. “Some years ago I was afflicted by a bronchial ailment. I have had the only allopathic treatment that is possible: antibiotics. But they have been of little avail. I am now taking some homoeopathic medicines. There is some relief. But an attack can come without notice and can be fatal. After dusk, I do not — cannot — step outdoors,” And yet he did precisely that, to bid me goodbye.
Time rolled on and I lost direct contact with Somnathbabu but the Calcutta-based social economist and my friend of many years V.K. Ramachandran kept my interest in Hore strengthened by sending me from time to time news of him and — electronic impressions of the Master’s woodcuts as reproduced in Tebhaga: An Artist’s Diary and Sketchbook. Each was greater than the other — two labourers talking animatedly over a chillum, farmhands at a threshing floor with a pair of sickles, perhaps making, and perhaps not, a political point, a bearded chasi bent over at work, his biceps and calves in comfortable tension, two huts in the smoky hush of dusk, a phenomenally attractive Jamshed Ali at 35, a woman — not Mother Teresa but an archetypal woman anticipating the gift of Albania to India and of India to human conscience — simply called Night, a mufflered Monida listening to something or someone intently, a woman standing with her child on her waist who could be Bengali, Indian, African, a bemused ‘volunteer’ leaning on a staff… each a living document.
Several years were to elapse before I was to see Somnathbabu and Rebadi again. My wife Tara and I were visiting Santiniketan for the first time after I had taken over my present assignment. My diary entry for 22 January 2005 reads: ‘Call on Somnath Hore. At 84, he is frail but clear of mind and speech. He shows us a piece of sculpture in black bronze inspired by Pokhran II. It depicts a human, a dog, a tree and a bird — all dead — killed in a nuclear winter. It is powerful beyond words, a masterpiece. Who am I to compare the Greats but I feel the composition is ahead of Picasso’s Guernica. I feel that piece must be acquired by the United Nations. Talking of nuclear plans, he says “we are mad”. And then he gives us a rare gift — another sculpture by him — a Hindu and a Muslim united in death. I cannot check my tears at his generosity. I say to him “I do not deserve this”, to which his daughter says “How do you know?” I cannot respond to that.’
Calling on Somnathbabu on subsequent visits to Santiniketan became a habit. On one such, when I went to his home with members of a team that the Visitor of Visva-Bharati had appointed to suggest plans for the university’s future health, he said with infinite sadness: “Everything is changing, everything, everywhere….” He was on a plane that seemed new, philosophical. There was no recrimination, no sense of the new generation being unkind to the earlier one and the mood suggested a Buddhist understanding of decay.
Somnath Hore was more than an artist. He was a witness of the human drama but a witness with a skill that translated his witnessing into art. In an age when secularism, socialism and peace can be seen — or rubbished — as shibboleths, he knew them to be vital needs. In times when art can become a plaything of drawing rooms and auction halls, he kept it close to its springs — his very human sensibility.’
