Somnath Hore was a great artist of collective hope and hardship, but his abiding legacy is to make us feel each human tragedy as our own.
(My India Today review of a Somnath Hore retrospective 'Birth of a White Rose', held at the Kiran Nader Museum of Art in the summer of 2022. To see some images from the exhibition, click here.)
What makes someone become an artist? Somnath Hore, who would have been 101 this summer, was first moved to draw in December 1942 by a moment of violence: the Japanese bombing of a village called Patia in what is now Bangladesh. Hore was then a B.Sc. student at City College in Calcutta, but World War II evacuation had forced him to return to his Chittagong home. The ghastly sight of Patia’s dead and wounded seemed to demand recording in some way, and it was images to which the young man turned.
In Calcutta, he had begun to
design posters for the Communist
Party, but it was Chittagong that
really put Hore on his political
and artistic path. Two things
happened in 1943: the Bengal
famine began, and Hore met
Chittaprosad. Six years Hore’s senior and also from Chittagong,
Chittaprosad was already a
prolific artist documenting the
lives of Bengal’s rural poor. As a man-made colonial tragedy
killed millions around them,
Chittaprosad encouraged Hore
to draw portraits of the hungry,
sick and dying. “From morning to
evening I used to accompany him
on his rounds,” Hore wrote later.
“He initiated me into directly
sketching the people I saw on
streets and hospitals.”
In 1945, Hore enrolled for
formal art training at the Government College of Art and Craft. In 1946, the Communist party sent
him off to Tebhaga in North Bengal, where he created a diary-like
documentation of the massive
peasant protests. It was a tumultuous decade, moving between
politics and art while having to
make a living by teaching school
students art. When the government again banned the Communist party, he went underground.
It was not until 1957-58 that Hore
got his diploma, and left Calcutta
and politics to become a lecturer
at the future Delhi College of Art.
The show at Delhi’s Kiran Nadar Museum of Art is superb; its
gravitas undimmed by ill-advised
curatorial versifying: sample “He
witnessed as a child a world not
so fair,/ Disparities between rich
and poor had no compare....”
It’s
clear that Hore experimented
with form and material through his six decades of art-making.
It’s also clear how much his lifelong sensibility was
sculpted by the tragic events
of his youth. Over and over,
you see him depict the suffering human body. Until the 1950s, he also depicts the magical charge of hope
produced when these same
bodies come together—to
plant seeds, flags, ideas. But
the stunning realism of the
early woodcuts and linocuts
gives way to abstraction, and
a greater economy of the line.
His figures are all concave
stomachs, stick-like limbs
and begging hands.
They
transition into the jagged,
torn, blistered bodies of his
bronze phase (animals, too,
show effects of violence), and
an almost meditative late
style, using pulped paper.
Here the lacerated body is
conceived as texture rather
than as line: white on white,
paper scored, torn and
moulded back into paper.
The pain of others remained,
forever, under his skin.
(Birth of a White Rose is on
at the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, Delhi, until June 30, 2022.)
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