Somnath Hore

Somnath Hore, noted printmaker, sculptor, painter and above all one of the leading artist-citizens of the country, passed away on the evening of September 30…finally getting rest from his prolonged illness in Bolpur. 


Born in Barama village in Chittagong in present day Bangladesh in 1921, while Hore was still very young, he started making posters for the Communist party. He (along with Chittoprashad) captured attention as a visual reporter of the 1943 Bengal famine for the Communist Party organ Jannayaddha (People's War). He was also associated with the peasant unrest of 1946.  Through the fifties, Hore got increasing dissatisfied with the conservative view of Marxist aesthetics as was being defined in stalinist Russia,and over a period of time, he distanced himself from the ‘Party’, and from then on he has been the leading figure in formulating the aesthetic-interventionist possibilities of a certain 'Indian neo-left' .


Later, at the Calcutta Art School, he mastered traditional printmaking media. He devoted himself seriously to printmaking in the 1950s, developing Viscosity in 1959 and a method for making pulp prints in 1970. As a versatile printmaker and teacher, he played a pioneering role in the printmaking movement in India. His 1991series, "Wounds" was epochal in terms of destroying boundaries that encased the discourse of printmaking.
Between the years 1954 to 1967, Hore performed various institutionalised pedagogical roles. 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. He belonged to the generation of teaching value systems, increasingly beginning to seem like a myth in our times…a generation of fairy tale teachers.

Holocaust

From 1974, he made expressive bronze sculptures. 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, and he has played a key role in helping contemporary Indian sculpture to break away from the cultural fixation with the finished surface. ‘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. ”Holocausts’, a sculpture executed in 1998 in remembrance of the Nuclear Holocaust, is a striking example of how Hore so brilliantly combines the language of print making and graphics without combining the mediums.


 Through his pedagogical interventions and his art, Somnath Hore tried to provide an alternative outlook on the definition of artistic originality. Instead of locating the artist as a genius operating within the social sphere, he critiqued ‘artistic originality’ by locating artistic agency within global heritage, and the artist as an agent who operates within the social web of working within the limitations and possibilities of his times. Artistic talent for Hore was the ability to engage with and further the possibilities within these tools.

The ‘narrative of Modern Indian Art’ has given Hore a backhanded compliment to the anti-hegemonic value/strength of his art and artistic practice. Hore’s is among the fascinating stories about exclusions within the mainstream practices of research, collecting, curating and publishing.  In a certain sense, one can be happy. The inability/ discomfort or the lack of interest shown by the mainstream in appropriating Somnath Hore confirms the ‘force’ of his work and this is further highlighted by his refusal to chase cultural capital.

Rahul Bhattacharya