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Agony and Ecstasy
Gallery Espace, New Delhi celebrates the inauguration of its 3rd Level space by paying rich tributes to the memory of the departed sculptor Somnath Hore. In the catalogue essay Ella Datta gives a comprehensive picture about the artist’s works and life. His sculptures are expressive of the basic concerns of ordinary people – a right to a life of dignity, says Ella Datta.
Somnath Hore (1921-2006) started sculpting fairly late in life. He was fifty-three years old when he began modeling playfully with wax. In a Bengali booklet called Amar Chitrabhabna (My thoughts on art) published by Seagull Books in 1992, Hore wrote that during the summer vacation of 1974 he became engrossed with a new game. Students of the sculpture department of Kala Bhavana in Santiniketan, like Chandravinod Pande and others, discarded lumps of wax, which they did not need. Hore picked them up aimlessly, modeled them into forms playfully and assembled them into sculptures. Chandravinod liked them and said that he would cast them in bronze. They were cast in a way that was not conventional and demanded a great deal of energy and effort.
All thoughts of rest and relaxation during the summer holidays vanished in a whirlwind of activities. Hore became deeply involved with a new medium. In the month of May 1975, Vietnam achieved victory after 29 years-long war of attrition between a poor, ill-equipped band of people committed to the idea of a free Vietnam and the world’s richest country, the USA. Even though they lived far away, the sculptor along with like-minded people had been concerned about the struggle.
It was against the backdrop of the Vietnamese victory that he conceived a new idea for a sculpture quite spontaneously. He cast in bronze a mother figure sheltering at her breast a new-born infant with arm upraised. The thought of nurturing a new nation was closely interlinked with this big sculpture measuring three feet four inches in height. The sculpture was finished after two and a half years of very hard work done between his other duties in the graphic department. But tragedy struck Hore immediately after he completed his massive piece. On the very night that he finished his sculpture, weighing nearly 40kgs, in 1977, it was stolen from the Kala Bhavana premises in the dead of night. No trace of it was detected afterwards.
Hore was shattered. He suspected that the theft of this massive bronze must have been a pre-planned exercise. So distressed was he that for the next few years, he did not touch wax or metal. Then in the Eighties, when he finally retired from Kala Bhavana, he decided to take up his work with bronze once again on a regular basis. He built a small furnace in his house in the village near Lal Bandh in Santiniketan. Local young men from the village Badal Roy and Sunil Marandi helped him to fire the furnace, do the preliminary chores and assist him in casting. Khadu Sheikh from Surul village helped him in making the channels for pouring in the molten metal and in preparing moulds. But the actual modeling of the wax sheet, giving shape to the formal concepts, applying the patina was done entirely by Hore.
With the exception of the first mother and child figure, the subsequent pieces by Hore were not generally very high. Most of the works were small pieces although there were exceptions where tallish attenuated figures were executed. The works are not voluminous. Hore was hesitant to call them sculptures. He preferred to describe them as bronzes.
Nevertheless, Hore created a distinctive genre of plastic forms. By flattening out wax sheets and gently modeling them with his fingers, he created folds, crevices, dips and swells and then joined the malleable planar forms with the channel rods which formed a kind of support and were not removed even after the works had been cast. It is as if the artist wished to have no veil between the image and its artistry.
In this way, Hore created the most inventive range of figures both human and animal. The forms represented ordinary people – mother and child, beggar, baul singer – and common animals like dogs, pigs, donkeys and occasional birds. He sometimes depicted a man grouped together with a dog. The structural forms had to be interesting for Hore to make him want to model them in wax.
There is a sense of anguish, resignation and at the same time dignity and fortitude in most of the figures. Hore once told this writer that he could never avoid the sad and melancholy note, no matter how much he tried. It was as if each exercise in sculpture was like remembering the wounds of humanity. He said that even when he set out to depict boys at play he ended up giving them sad faces. But he had discovered that in the deepest experience of pain, there could be the ecstasy of creation.
As if in confirmation of Hore’s statement, Professor K G Subramanyan wrote on Somnath Hore in Visions, a catalogue published in 1986 by Ladies Study Group to accompany an exhibition of works of four artists – Somnath Hore, Ganesh Pyne, Bikash Bhattacharjee and Jogen Chowdhury, “On a summer morning the world glows with sunlight, the flowers load the trees, the breeze wafts a heady kind of perfume – but in Somnath’s vision it is the spectacle of man’s suffering that steals the show. In his painting and sculptures, in prints and drawings, it is invariably the same.”
The catastrophic event that irrevocably shaped his tragic vision was the Bengal Famine of 1943 where millions were said to have died. It had been the stuff of art, literature, cinema and theatre in Bengal and later West Bengal. Hore was 22 years old then and had been drawing posters for the Communist Party since his teens. During the calamitous 1943 Famine, Hore met artist Chittaprosad. It was Chittaprosad who first showed him how to draw the starving and desperately ill figures. Hore had no formal training in art at the time. The Communist Party supplied him with brush, ink, colours and paper and he would draw posters of the ravages of Famine. The party workers showed these posters in villages and gradually a new peasant’s movement sprang up. In 1944, he was admitted to the Government Art College at the initiative of the then party secretary P C Joshi. He began formally training in art under the tutelage of Zainul Abedin.
In 1956, Hore and his wife Reba, renounced their party membership. A lifelong believer in Marxist philosophy, he nevertheless felt a conflict between the demands of aesthetics and the demands of political diktats. But the memory of the skeletal, ravaged figures that he had witnessed during the Famine continued to haunt him all his life. So much so, he recreated them repeatedly in various mediums.
In the sculptures, the archetype of hungry, beaten, dispossessed humans is seen again and again in the taut skin that acts as a sheath, tightly stretched against angular bones. You can see him or her in the vacant gaze of the eyes, which are mere slashes in the head or in the slack, gaping mouth.
He has envisaged man as engaged in ceaseless toil, as well as a wounded figure. So when he worked on the wax planes, which when cast would form the skin, he would not make it smooth and sleek. Instead, he would pit and gouge the surface, add rough encrustations, tear out rough jagged edges. At first glance they look unstable, a teetering group of emaciated, lost, disempowered people. But another look and one is struck by their tensile strength and the essence of form that the artist captures. Although they may lack mass and volume, they command an infinite amount of space around them.
Even more impressive is the sensitivity, empathy and humanism with which he endows his figures. This is particularly manifest in the mother and child figures. A standing female figure carries her worldly possessions in a little bundle on her head and holds her infant in her arms. It is clear that she does not have much material possessions but the tenderness with which she holds her baby and the infinite trust with which the child clings to her speaks of a special relationship that defies the travails of the world. Hore has depicted this relationship of dependence and protection in many forms. A seated figure of a mother and child shows similar close bonding.
A baul singer with his musical instrument, an ektara, sings with his head thrown back in a state of mystical abandon. It is patent that the artist identifies with the labourers, the impoverished, the physically challenged. A crippled man walking with crutches, a man carrying loads on his shoulders, a mendicant, a figure carrying a pair of buckets, all speak of human dignity. The artist has caught the rhythm of their stances and gaits with sensitivity. Similarly, the small figure of the donkey distils the essence of this load-bearing animal. The figure of the bird with its squat delineation is somewhat of an exception to his style.
The sculptures are not only appealing for the expressiveness of their structure and their intriguing textures but also for the variations in their patina. Most of the pieces have a dark patina, a favourite with Hore. But there are interesting departures. For instance, the bird has a reddish patina. The donkey gleams like brass in places. There are other works, which have some subtle variations. Hore has said that he liked this part of the sculptural process very much and enjoyed experimentation at this stage.
Hore had cast for himself a unique place in the Indian sculptural tradition. His figures are not heroic or monumental. They are neither romantic, nor lyric. Instead, they are expressive of the basic concerns of ordinary people – a right to a life of dignity. And to suit the subject, he has worked with great economy of material and of scale. How effectively he had brought out the quality of the material and the excitement of bare-boned structures are also worth note. The result is haunting images of man and beast engaged in the act of survival.
(courtesy Gallery Espace, New Delhi) |
