During the Seagull Foundation for the Arts’ retrospective of Somnath Hore’s works three of his art books and journals, including the previously unpublished The Tea Garden Journal, caught Niki Seth-Smith’s attention
The late Somnath Hore is revered as an artist and committed humanist whose print-work, drawing and sculpture is born out of a sensibility highly tuned to the social plight of Bengal. The Seagull Foundation for the Arts’ new exhibition invites us to view Hore’s oeuvre alongside his art books and journals, allowing a deeper insight into the life and work of one of the great figures of twentieth century Bengal.
The Seagull Foundation for the Arts’ new exhibition directs us towards a fuller knowledge of the artist, by accompanying its retrospective of Hore’s watercolours, sculptures and pen and ink drawings with three of his art books and journals: Tebhaga, My Concept of Art, and the previously unpublished The Tea Garden Journal.
Hore’s watercolours and pen and ink drawings occupy the first floor of the exhibition. These pieces evade traditional concepts of the ‘polished work’. Instead, Hore’s pen flies at his subjects with a searing empathy that sets its sights beyond studied realism. Whether an ink and watercolour of a village family, or a 30-second sketch of a farmer with his back towards us, these are works conveying such engagement of feeling that its easy to entertain the belief that Hore had met his subjects - ate the same food, breathed the same air.
While such musings on the artist at work could be easily dismissed as idle speculation, Tebhaga and the previously unpublished The Tea Garden Journal allow us to engage with Hore’s formative artistic experiences. The journals reveal sympathy with his subjects as essential to the development of Hore’s uniquely humanist vision.
Both journals document the young artist’s experience of Tebhaga ~ the workers’ movement of the mid-1940s.
The movement saw sharecroppers demanding that they be allowed to retain a two-thirds share of their produce, instead of the 50/50 system between the workers and the jotedars ~ a class of rich farmers who held superior rights to the land. In the winter of 1946, Hore had been assigned by the Communist Party to document what has been described as the first consciously attempted revolution by the peasantry in India. The two journals are Hore’s personal records of those days, and show the young artist going through an initiation by fire ~ developing, by necessity, the keen and empathic eye for depicting the common man for which he is now renowned.
The diaries themselves are earnest, factual accounts of the movement. Stirring portraits of key figures in the Union are interspersed with sketches and woodcuts of villagers going about their everyday pursuits before staging covert meetings by moonlight.
The Seagull Foundation for the Arts has reprinted a version of the original 1989 Tebhaga edition for the exhibition. The Tea Garden Journal, meanwhile, is being made available for the first time to the public. While a portion of its art works are marred by water stains and mould marks, this journal is perhaps the most evocative of the two, as it takes a freer form than the strict diary mode of Tebhaga, and ends with a poignant series of portraits ~ both textual and artistic ~ of the sharecroppers involved in the movement.
While Tebhaga and The Tea Garden Journal cast light on Hore’s formative years as a young artist, My Concept of Art ~ also available from the Seagull Foundation for the Arts ~ provides an over-arching account of the artist’s life and attitude towards his work.
An autobiographical and philosophical work written in 1991, My Concept of Art is illustrated and enlivened with pen sketches from throughout Hore’s working life.
The book takes us from the time when, at six-years-old, Hore ‘forgets to eat and loses all track of time’ while making his first work of art ~ a model of a seaplane ~ to the picture of the elderly artist living a simple life in Shantiniketan. By this time, Hore has formulated his concept of ‘wounds’, and his art is preoccupied with, in his words: ‘an endless investigation of this same subject’. He writes in My Concept of Art: “The ruts left on the road by wheels, the cut from the axe on the side of the tree, the injuries on the human body left by weapons ~ to my eyes, they all appeared to be wounds.”
The exhibition’s ground floor is alive with Hore’s sculptures, created during this later period of his life. The bronzes displayed are rarely larger than a couple of hand-spans in length and height. Scraps of metal seem to have been hammered, contorted, and twisted into the likeness of dogs, goats, hunched-over old men and children caught mid-play.
Ribs protrude while skeletal faces implore the viewer to stop and become transfixed. These forms, for their lack of realism, could be called crude, and yet in Hore’s hands they prove arresting in their brute expressionism. Hore’s concept of ‘wounds’ is manifest in these sculptures ~ not in the literal form, but as injuries, both emotional and physical, dealt out by poverty, hunger and malnutrition.
By bringing out these new and old editions of Hore’s journals alongside an exhibition of his work, The Seagull Foundation for the Arts has given both lovers of Hore’s work and new initiates the chance to delve deeper into the mind and work of one of twentieth century Bengal’s great artists and humanists. While it is more than possible to gain a profound appreciation of the artist’s work without knowledge of the surrounding political context, or of the artist’s struggle with his own artistic and social commitments, there is perhaps an added level of empathy to be gained through a wider knowledge of Hore’s subject matter. If so, Hore’s journals and books become essential reading, for as Hore says himself in My Concept of Art: “The ulterior goal of a work of art may well be the creation of beauty, but what defines beauty? It is empathy that elevates the vessel by adding beauty.”
No comments:
Post a Comment