Spotlight on Somnath Hore, printmaker, sculptor, chronicler

KNMA pays rich tribute to the seminal artist through an exhaustive retrospective

An Untitled woodcut on print by Somnath Hore from the KNMA Collection. Credit: Kiran Nadar Museum of Art

Installation view of Somnath Hore's bronzes at the exhibition. Credit: Kiran Nadar Museum of Art

Installation view of the exhibition Somnath Hore: Birth of a White Rose, on view at KNMA, New Delhi. Credit: Kiran Nadar Museum of Art

Somnath Hore played a vital role in the evolving modernism of Indian art from the 1940s. He was one of the strong voices of the distressed people under the waning British Raj, right through to the turn of the millennium, when the name, face and character of oppression had changed.

The Kiran Nadar Museum of Art presents an exhaustive retrospective of Hore's work in a show titled Somnath Hore: Birth of a White Rose on his 101st anniversary.

The show, named after Hore's (1921-2006) eponymous work that won the 1962 National Award of the Lalit Kala Akademi, is on view at the Saket branch of the museum in New Delhi through June 30.

Perhaps the biggest show of the seminal artist's oeuvre, it brings together his prints—that the artist was most well-known for—metal plates used in printing, paintings, drawings and the lesser-known bronze sculptures.

Born in Chittagong in present-day Bangladesh, Hore studied briefly at Calcutta's Government School of Art and trained under contemporary artists Zainul Abedin and Saifuddin Ahmed.

Like all sensitive artists of the time, the devastating 1943 Bengal Famine, an artificial crisis in which two to three million people died, and the violent Tebhaga peasant uprising of 1946 impacted him deeply.

The Communist Party of India was at the forefront of providing relief in the Bengal countryside during these two epochal events. A member of the party, Hore witnessed the pain and trauma of the commoner, the pathos of which he translated in his works. Giving expression to human suffering became his lifelong leitmotif.

Read: Under the skin of suffering

"That's what makes Hore's contribution important," said Roobina Karode, the show's curator and director with KNMA. "His was not just modernist art but 'humanist modernism.' It also makes his art relevant to present times due to the despair induced by the pandemic. It makes us empathetic to human suffering and sensitive to crises of unprecedented scale."

In chronicling suffering of such immense proportions through their art, Hore and his contemporaries preserved memories of a time that humanity has a way of forgetting. A direct encounter with images of emaciated bodies brooding in resignation, eyes pleading for food and mercy, is as poignant as unsettling, yet a much-needed jolt.

Besides erudite curation and scale, the show succeeds in its design—the visitor is gradually led from the famine and the Tebhaga protest prints and drawings to Hore's well-known Wounds series and rare oil paintings to the ultimate section of bronze sculptures that open up like a beautiful panorama at the end.

Even though quite a few of his bronzes have hollowed out torsos of men, women and children in duress, there is a lyrical quality about the works that make some pieces, such as Mother and Child, endearing.

This is one of the best tributes to Hore, who mentored a generation of students and artists, first at the Delhi Polytechnic where he set up a printmaking department in 1958, and then in Santiniketan, where he served as the head of the printmaking department at Kala Bhavana and imbued their art with altruism that all art should have.

(The writer is a New Delhi-based journalist, editor and arts consultant)