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拍品专文
Somnath Hore was born in 1921 in the village of Barama in Chittagong, in what is now the eastern part of Bangladesh. Following a stint as a poster artist for the Communist Party of India, he studied printmaking at the Government College of Art and Craft in Calcutta. Unsurprisingly, much of Hore’s work expresses his responses to the major historical and sociopolitical events of the Twentieth Century that resulted in widespread human suffering, particularly those in his native Bengal. Most significant among these were the famine of 1943, his involvement with the Communist Party of India, his family’s participation in India’s struggle for independence and his observations of the sharecroppers’ movement and the Naxalite struggle.
Documenting the horrific realities of the famine for the Communist Party’s magazine left an indelible impression on the artist, and the hardship and pain he witnessed became central to his visual vocabulary. “Violence and suffering, compassion and loneliness are inseparably linked in Somnath Hore’s vision of reality. However, this does not mean that he sees despair as the natural state of man. Human suffering in his view is man-made and social, not natural or metaphysical. Therefore, to persistently depict the degradation of man and the social marginality of the victim is for him an act of protest and a symbolic assertion of his solidarity with the persecuted” (R. Siva Kumar, Somnath Hore Bronzes, Calcutta, 1995, p. 39). As such Hore’s work, shaped by the interplay of his memories, socialist ideals and political consciousness, underscores that persecution and violence are choices made by man, and can be averted if we truly understand their cost to humanity.
It was in the mid-1970s, after the violence of the Bangladesh Liberation War, that Hore began to work on sculptures, translating the anguish and tragedy articulated in his prints, drawings and cast paper pulp pieces into three dimensions with astonishing effect. Describing the artist’s unique casting technique and style of figuration, Pranabranjan Ray notes that “The armatures, air vents and escape pipes of the molten metal are arranged in such a manner as they form the skeletal structures of the figures with the bones, veins and all that. The sheets of thin metal over the torso and the head of the figure is, at the same time, like a skin covering the bones with no flesh intervening and a bandage covering the wounds. The ends of the metal sheets join in such a manner as it suggests a slashed-open skin or skins with marks of surgical operation or skins showing naked bones. They are like living apparitions from scenes of destruction walking down the corridors of a hospital after being attended to” (P. Ray, Hore, New Delhi, pp. 8-9).
As Aveek Ghose observes, “What was, and still is, of interest is to note the way [Hore] played with the surface of his figures. Humans and animals display comparative degrees of roughness and smoothness in selected areas of the physiognomy, suggesting the strength of life that his figures are endowed with. Starvation and such other sufferings are personified by rickety limbs while smooth skin may suggest healthier status” (A. Ghose, Somnath Hore: Life and Art, Kolkata, 2007, p. 13).
In lot 14, Hore is perhaps returning to his memories of the 1943 Bengal Famine. Sculpted in the artist’s signature style, here, a sitting figure seems to stare into the void. His eyes and mouth have been roughly carved out of the metal sheet and his features are pinched, expressing a soundless plea for help. A small dog stands behind him, its ribs sharply defined against an emaciated flank. Both figures seem frozen in place, their gaunt bodies defined by their shared experiences of the atrocities they are living through. Despite this, their prospects are not completely bleak. Hore portrays the male figure tenderly placing one hand upon his canine companion’s head, in a sure sign of hope and resilience in dark times.
In another sculpture, lot 17, a kneeling figure’s mask‑like face, with oversized features and hollowed depressions for eyes, conveys a haunting innocence like that of a plaintive child looking up towards its guardians. Hore leaves the reverse of the head open, with only minimal support keeping it upright, perhaps signifying the dissolution of identity and the profound loss of self that follows trauma inflicted by forces beyond one’s control. Here, both the face and body of the figure appear smooth, creating what Ghose sees as a sign of health. However, this appears to be deceptive as the subject’s shrouded body gives little sense of a strong and able being beneath the cloth loosely draped around it — their atrophied limbs, drawn close as the figure kneels, reveal the fragility that lies below the surface.
“Turning [Hore’s] bronzes in our hands or running our hands over them, we become aware of this intimate shaping process. The visual metamorphoses of the punched holes, the slit surfaces, the torn edges, the marks left by molten wax, and the rugged channels, into empty eyes and wordless mouths into torn and scalded skin, into mangled bodies exposed bones and mis-shapenned limbs are also most convincing at this scale. Somnath Hore’s transformations are engaging but his virtuosity is never demonstrative. He does not use skill like a craftsman, though technique is crucial to his vision it achieves a rare incisiveness in his hands. He puts form-realisation above the political overtones of subject-matter, and believes that great art outlives its historical moment. In his own words the artistic excellence of art ‘is revealed through its own components, not because of any message or polemic’” (R. Siva Kumar, Somnath Hore Bronzes, Calcutta, 1995, p. 36).
Documenting the horrific realities of the famine for the Communist Party’s magazine left an indelible impression on the artist, and the hardship and pain he witnessed became central to his visual vocabulary. “Violence and suffering, compassion and loneliness are inseparably linked in Somnath Hore’s vision of reality. However, this does not mean that he sees despair as the natural state of man. Human suffering in his view is man-made and social, not natural or metaphysical. Therefore, to persistently depict the degradation of man and the social marginality of the victim is for him an act of protest and a symbolic assertion of his solidarity with the persecuted” (R. Siva Kumar, Somnath Hore Bronzes, Calcutta, 1995, p. 39). As such Hore’s work, shaped by the interplay of his memories, socialist ideals and political consciousness, underscores that persecution and violence are choices made by man, and can be averted if we truly understand their cost to humanity.
It was in the mid-1970s, after the violence of the Bangladesh Liberation War, that Hore began to work on sculptures, translating the anguish and tragedy articulated in his prints, drawings and cast paper pulp pieces into three dimensions with astonishing effect. Describing the artist’s unique casting technique and style of figuration, Pranabranjan Ray notes that “The armatures, air vents and escape pipes of the molten metal are arranged in such a manner as they form the skeletal structures of the figures with the bones, veins and all that. The sheets of thin metal over the torso and the head of the figure is, at the same time, like a skin covering the bones with no flesh intervening and a bandage covering the wounds. The ends of the metal sheets join in such a manner as it suggests a slashed-open skin or skins with marks of surgical operation or skins showing naked bones. They are like living apparitions from scenes of destruction walking down the corridors of a hospital after being attended to” (P. Ray, Hore, New Delhi, pp. 8-9).
As Aveek Ghose observes, “What was, and still is, of interest is to note the way [Hore] played with the surface of his figures. Humans and animals display comparative degrees of roughness and smoothness in selected areas of the physiognomy, suggesting the strength of life that his figures are endowed with. Starvation and such other sufferings are personified by rickety limbs while smooth skin may suggest healthier status” (A. Ghose, Somnath Hore: Life and Art, Kolkata, 2007, p. 13).
In lot 14, Hore is perhaps returning to his memories of the 1943 Bengal Famine. Sculpted in the artist’s signature style, here, a sitting figure seems to stare into the void. His eyes and mouth have been roughly carved out of the metal sheet and his features are pinched, expressing a soundless plea for help. A small dog stands behind him, its ribs sharply defined against an emaciated flank. Both figures seem frozen in place, their gaunt bodies defined by their shared experiences of the atrocities they are living through. Despite this, their prospects are not completely bleak. Hore portrays the male figure tenderly placing one hand upon his canine companion’s head, in a sure sign of hope and resilience in dark times.
In another sculpture, lot 17, a kneeling figure’s mask‑like face, with oversized features and hollowed depressions for eyes, conveys a haunting innocence like that of a plaintive child looking up towards its guardians. Hore leaves the reverse of the head open, with only minimal support keeping it upright, perhaps signifying the dissolution of identity and the profound loss of self that follows trauma inflicted by forces beyond one’s control. Here, both the face and body of the figure appear smooth, creating what Ghose sees as a sign of health. However, this appears to be deceptive as the subject’s shrouded body gives little sense of a strong and able being beneath the cloth loosely draped around it — their atrophied limbs, drawn close as the figure kneels, reveal the fragility that lies below the surface.
“Turning [Hore’s] bronzes in our hands or running our hands over them, we become aware of this intimate shaping process. The visual metamorphoses of the punched holes, the slit surfaces, the torn edges, the marks left by molten wax, and the rugged channels, into empty eyes and wordless mouths into torn and scalded skin, into mangled bodies exposed bones and mis-shapenned limbs are also most convincing at this scale. Somnath Hore’s transformations are engaging but his virtuosity is never demonstrative. He does not use skill like a craftsman, though technique is crucial to his vision it achieves a rare incisiveness in his hands. He puts form-realisation above the political overtones of subject-matter, and believes that great art outlives its historical moment. In his own words the artistic excellence of art ‘is revealed through its own components, not because of any message or polemic’” (R. Siva Kumar, Somnath Hore Bronzes, Calcutta, 1995, p. 36).