Figures of Pain

The show,on till December 9 at the Mumbai gallery,is the artist’s first retrospective of the prints after his demise in 2006. It comprises 130 prints,including his early woodcuts,apart from the colour intaglios,spit-bite and other variations of his soft-ground aquatints. “These woodcut prints are rare works. They were part of Hore’s portfolio and some of his earliest works. He took them along everywhere he went looking for a job. He experimented a lot with media and was undoubtedly the finest printmaker in India,” says Supriya Banerji of Gallery 88.

What stands out in this show is his famous innovation made in 1971 — pulp prints that he made by using cement mould out of clay-matrix. In these prints,he combined true-to-life depictions of wounds with abstract designs — an artistic expression that he developed after closely witnessing the Bengal famine of 1943,communal riots of 1946 and the Tebhaga movement. Hore had once said,“Wounds is what I saw everywhere around me. A scarred tree,a road gauged by a truck tyre,a man knifed for no visible or rational reason. A new concept was born. The object was eliminated,only wounds remained.” The objects that Hore talks about were dilapidated figures of human suffering that he documented. When Hore gave up printmaking in his later years,he recreated these figures in sculptures.

For his daughter Chandana,who is also a painter,these works are keepsake. “My father was deeply involved in them. He said when he worked laboriously on his art,he derived a ‘rasa’. Even though the technique was very tiresome and lengthy,he made the paper himself,” she says. Hence,his work has been hard to preserve. “I wanted to exhibit his works before they perish,” she adds. Until now,Chandana has been storing her father’s prints in the specially-built cabinets in Santiniketan,where he taught graphics and printmaking at Kala Bhavan,under the Visva Bharati University. “The weather in Santiniketan is fairly dry,so I have not had much trouble yet,” she says,hoping that her father’s works become part of a museum’s collection. “They are historic works and should be preserved for generations to come. That’s the reason,I don’t want to sell them,” she adds.

While Chandana has come to terms with the issues of preservation,she is still bitter about an incident related to the works. In 2007,when Renu Modi’s Gallery Espace,Delhi,announced an exhibition of Hore’s 22 sculptures,Hore’s wife,Reba and Chandana discovered that all the works were fake. After they complained about it,the show was called off. “Creating such fakes is a very big scandal and nothing is being done about it,” rues Chandana.

Hore had once clearly mentioned that his techinque is such that a replica can’t be made. Chandana feels helpless as no one has been accounted for the fakes yet. “I wanted a CBI inquiry and wrote to the central and state government about it,but I don’t know how such cases in art are dealt with.” Another incident that rankles her is the theft of Hore’s bronze sculpture of a mother with a child. The sculpture paid homage to the people’s struggle in Vietnam. It was stolen from Kala Bhavan in the ’70s and has still not been recovered.