Somnath Hore
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Somnath Hore (1921-2006) was an Indian sculptor and printmaker, noted for his passionate rendering of human conditions. His sketches and pictorial documents as a witness of major historical crises in history of 20th century Bengal (such as the Bengal Famine of 1943 or the Tebhaga Movement) display his unflinching humanism and social commitment as an artist.
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[edit] Life
Somnath Hore was born in 1921 in Chittagong, now in Bangladesh.[1] In his youth he was affiliated to the Communist Party, and his socialist ideologies influenced the early phases of his artistic career.[1] He did visual documentation and reporting of the Bengal famine in 1943 for the Communist Party magazine, titled Jannayuddha (People's War); his coming of age as an artist coinsided with the 1946 peasant unrest in Tebhaga, Bengal.[2] Later, at the Government College of Art and Craft in Calcutta he learned the methods and nuances of printmaking, mainly lithography and intaglio. From 1950s he was being regarded as the premiere printmaker in India, inventing and developing various techniques of his own, including his famous pulp-print technique (immortalized in the critically acclaimed and much celebrated Wounds series of prints). From 1970s he started making sculptures, and his elongated bronze figurines became one of the iconic emblems of modern Indian art.
Somnath Hore lived most of his later life in Santiniketan, and taught at Kala Bhavan, the art faculty of Visva Bharati University. There he became a close associate of sculptor Ramkinkar Baij, painter K.G. Subramanyan and artist Dinkar Kaushik, at whose behest he came to Santinikatan to set the Graphics and Printmaking Department of Kala Bhavan. He died in 2006 at the age of 85. He is survived by his wife Reba Hore, herself an established artist, and daughter Chandana Hore, also a painter. He was posthumously awarded Padma Bhushan in 2007.
[edit] Style
Initially his drawings and his Tebhaga series of woodcuts in early 1950s show the influence of Chinese Socialist Realism and German Expressionism. He was also influenced in his youth by the robust style of German printmaker Kathe Kollwitz and Austrian Expressionist Oskar Kokoschka. Later his drawings, especially his human figures, became simplified, shedding details, and slowly through this reduction he achieved his celebrated indivual style of elongated suffering figures. His sculptures too show similar approach of simplification. Somnath’s artistic journey reached culmination in his Wounds Series of paper pulp prints in 1970s, where he had achieved a mastery of a unique brand abstraction without sacrifising his inherent humanism. Somnath Hore remains one of the more versatile artists of Modern India, and his social commitments remained unparalleled.
