Hores Cry Hoarse

In art nothing is completely original.
Somnath Hore ,CIMA,1ST November ,1991

Uma Nair

The art of angst rubbed shoulders with situational irony. For art lovers who stood in front of the Somnath Hores at Gallery Espace in Delhi it became the case of an enigma sometimes wrapped in a fake! Burrow inside a kaleidoscopic of hollows, surrounded by captivating shards of abstract sheets of bronze, reflecting shifting shadows of desolation. Hore's wife and daughter cried hoarse as they blew the story to the media, but autograph authenticity of a sculpture, and pucca provenance, nit-picking and the money market all show India as a nascent underdeveloped art market. Amidst an ocean of frustration and failure, Hore the sculptor of yesteryear was brought unwillingly and unwittingly into the limelight.

Inside sources claim the works for Gallery Espace were procured from Hore's nephew and therein lies the fulcrum of fake production in Kolkata houses-and extended families. A good fake is as good as the real thing because it takes a good artist to fake a masterpiece, whether it's for cash, development or homage. But Kolkata is a hotbed of fakes, with families running production units like Jamini Roy's and Hore's and Hemen Mazumdar's and Chugtai's, which means that it is the secondary market that deals in fakes. But the power to identify a fake also becomes a moot point, here you have Renu Modi who has done great work for sculpture and you have a critic Ella Dutta who also holds enviable credntials. But for obvious reasons, they were both fooled! Therein lies the irnony!

Historically, the art world has been plagued by fakes and forgeries for over two thousand years which began largely as a result of buyers being more interested in the aesthetics of the work than who painted it. It was during the Renaissance that artworks became a commodity, resulting in the value of an artwork being directly related to the profile of the artist and consequently making the issue of fakes and forgeries far more important.

Interestingly major advances in technology have bought about new and improved methods of creating forgeries, which make it harder and harder to spot the fakes. The Internet has provided the perfect market place for fakes and forgeries through a lack of regulation, which gives sellers the ability to provide false details, misrepresent goods and generally deceive buyers.

In 1995, MOMA (NY) had this unusual exhibition titled Rembrandt/Not Rembrandt. But let's not forget that the Met is in an ideal position to throw a spotlight on the drama of connoisseurship, the art-historical term for the activity of identifying the author of a painting, largely through close visual analysis.

Coming back to Indian shores, the nascent Indian market shows that documentation is not merely maddeningly scarce, but not informed enough. Not only does India not have seasoned, penetrative probing gazed art critics, it has all kinds of people writing on art. `Once a painting/sculpture enters the arena of dispute, all the experts can do is argue the matter out' says artist Ram Kumar ruing the fact that dealers, galleries and auction houses continue to play hide and seek about fakes. `You can recognize a fake a mile away, unless you have a real good argument, with specific points, that something is authentic, it is better to leave it a question mark,," Ram Kumar says. "There is a lot of contradiction in this, you know. I think a good critic will see it right away and  people will take over his/her opinion' .Art Stalwarts say that Gallery Espace has been a pioneer in bringing sculpture from a languishing pale to the limelight. (Sculpture 1995).

Somnath Hore's biggest collector in India is Ebrahim Alkazi, the man who discovered the gold mine in Indian art (including Tyeb Mehta) more than sixty years ago and collected quietly. Interestingly Somnath Hore the graphic guru known for his white pulp prints turned to sculptures only in 1974. Alkazi held a show of Somnath Hore at Delhi's cultural oasis Triveni in 1998 and the historic show that alas had no catalogue was emblematic of Hore's artistic inner angst. The only two catalogues that exist are CIMA's 1995 and Lalit Kala Akademi's monograph published by Richard Bartholomew. The authority on Hore who wrote for both these catalogues was Pranabranjan Ray who lives in Kolkatta. (The CIMA 1995 catalogue also contains a well researched article by the Santiniketan based art historian R.Sivakumar (Somnath Hore: Images of Discontent) and a self argumentative article by Somnath Hore himself titled ‘Wounds’, besides a small forward by the artist- Editor)

Somnath Hore's bare, forked animals and humans challenge our notions of conventional beauty. They force us to rewrite the definition of beauty that does not afford any sensuous pleasures — only the bare bones of a form — a notion carried to its logical conclusion `Empathy imposes beauty on the ugliest objects; lack of empathy robs even the most beautiful of it,'  wrote Hore in 1991.
Hore's works and words remind us yet again that in a work of art, severity of form has the power of endowing human beings reduced to skeletons by hunger, and with only a tenuous link with life, with a certain dignity. Nothing in his colourless tunnel is hidden. The monochromatic mechanism -- coated plastic -- is simple and exposed. The obvious similarity to a small island of urge made it universally accessible, even to those for whom contemporary art is alien. Once that difference is recognized, there is indeed no turning back.
`Among Hore's wax sheet sculptures no two can exist because the sheet is destroyed as soon as the original emerges. Hore did no copies because he never worked in clay,' says student Jayasree Burman. Ironically the fake market in India echoes Hore's words when he wrote: `One has to cross the boundaries of the theme to create a meaningful work, something an artist cannot achieve through sheer will power. Too much sentimentalism creates a barrier to a full understanding of pictorial values.'