About Book
In December 1991, The Seagull Foundation for the Arts organized an exhibition of the bronze works of Santiniketan-based artist, Somnath Hore. Entitled Wounds, this comprehensive collection of the artist’s works dazzled viewers with both its elemental power and its pathos. To accompany the exhibition, the artist wrote a brief but dense essay in Bengali—Aamar Chitro Bhabana. Translated here for the first time, this quasi-autobiographical essay leads the reader through the various vicissitudes of the artist’s life: from his early adventures in drawing to his involvement in the freedom struggle through the Communist Party to his formal induction into the world of art. It outlines the various changes in his artistic thinking in terms of his life both as an artist as well as a human being with passionate convictions of how the world ought to be. It places his life in the context of the social and the political world around him and it explains ‘Wounds’, a concept that provided the background idea to his lifelong experiments in bronze. A powerful insight into one man’s notions regarding art and politics and the interrelationships between them.
About Author
Somnath Hore was born in 1921 in Chittagong, now in Bangladesh. He lost his father early and was schooled with the help of his uncle. In his youth he became affiliated with the Communist Party, and his socialist ideologies influenced the early phases of his artistic career. It was through the active patronage of the Communist Party of India that Hore gained entrance to the Government Art College in Calcutta. Haren Das was then presiding over the graphics department, and Hore had the advantage of learning from him.[1]
In 1943 he did visual documentation and reporting of the Bengal famine for the Communist Party magazine Jannayuddha (People's War). His coming of age as an artist coincided with the 1946 peasant unrest in Bengal known as the Tebhaga movement. Hore became a follower of Chittaprosad Bhattacharya, the political propagandist and printmaker.
Hore learned the methods and nuances of printmaking, mainly lithography and intaglio, at the Government College of Art and Craft in Calcutta. By the 1950s he was regarded as the premier printmaker in India. Hore invented and developed various printmaking techniques of his own, including his famous pulp-print technique, which he used in the critically acclaimed Wounds series of prints.
At the behest of Dinkar Kaushik, Hore came to Santiniketan to head the Graphics and Printmaking Department. Somnath lived most of his later life at Santiniketan, where he taught at Kala Bhavan, the art faculty of Visva Bharati University. There he became a close associate of the painter K.G. Subramanyan and the sculptor Ramkinkar Baij
In the 1970s Hore also started making sculpture. His contorted bronze figurines recalled the agonies of famine and war, and became iconic emblems of modern Indian art.[3] One of his largest sculptures, Mother and Child, which paid tribute to the sufferings of the people of Vietnam, was stolen from Kala Bhavan soon after it was finished and disappeared without a trace.
Hore died in 2006 at the age of 85. He is prominently represented in the collection of the National Gallery of Modern Art, New Delhi