Somnath Hore
Somnath Hore | |
---|---|
Born | 1921 Chittagong, British India |
Died | 2006 (aged 84–85) Santiniketan, India |
Nationality | Indian |
Alma mater | Visva-Bharati University |
Occupation(s) | Painter, sculptor, muralist, printmaker |
Spouse | Reba Hore |
Awards | Padma Bhushan |
Somnath Hore (1921-2006) was an Indian sculptor and printmaker. His sketches, sculptures and prints were a reaction to major historical crises and events of 20th century Bengal, such as the Bengal Famine of 1943 and the Tebhaga movement. He was a recipient of the Indian civilian honour of the Padma Bhushan.[1]
Early life
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.[2]
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.[2]
Career
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.[3]
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.[2]
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.[4] 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.[5]
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.[6]
Following the death of the artist Gopal Krishna Gandhi wrote in the newspaper Telegraph, "Somnath Hore was more than an artist. He was a witness of the human drama but a witness with a skill that translated his witnessing into art. In an age when secularism, socialism and peace can be seen- or rubbished- as shibboleths, he knew them to be vital needs. In times when art can become a play-thing of drawing rooms and auction halls, he kept it close to its springs-his human sensibility."
While the reputed art historian R. Siva Kumar in the essay entitled Somnath Hore : A Reclusive Socialist and a Modernist Artist wrote, "We do not choose suffering, and we do not choose heroism. But suffering often compels us to be heroic. Somnath Hore (1921–2006) was an artist who led a quiet and heroic life. Quiet because he always kept himself away from the glare of the art world; and heroic because he chose to stand by the suffering and held steadfast to his political and thematic commitments even though he knew this meant trading a lonely path. He kept himself away from the din of art not because art was a lesser passion for him but because life mattered more and art did not stand witness to human suffering, did not mean much to him. And human suffering was for him, as a Communist, not an existential predicament, into which we are all born (or a visitation or even a tool to know god as it was for Van Gogh), but something always socially engendered." In the same essay R. Siva Kumar writes, "The famine and the sharecropper's revolt acquired an archetypal significance in Somnath Hore's vision of reality. During these years there were a host of other tragic visitations: the communal riots, the Partition, the exodus of the religious minorities and the loss of home for millions, including Somnath. But none of them found a place in his work comparable to that of the famine and the peasant revolt, which were for him symbols of human condition and aspirations of those with whom he identified.”[7]
Style
In the early 1950s Hore's drawings and his Tebhaga series of woodcuts show the influence of Chinese Socialist Realism and German Expressionism. He was also influenced in his youth by the robust style of German printmaker Käthe Kollwitz and Austrian Expressionist Oskar Kokoschka. As the artist evolved, his drawings, especially his human figures, became simplified and shed details. Through this reduction he achieved his individual style of contorted and suffering figures created with a masterly use of line. His sculptures show a similar approach. In the 1970s Somnath's artistic journey culminated in his Wounds Series of paper pulp prints, where he achieved a unique brand of abstraction without sacrificing his long-practiced humanism.[2]
References
- ^ "Padma Awards" (PDF). Ministry of Home Affairs, Government of India. 2015. Retrieved 21 July 2015.
- ^ a b c d Somnath Hore, Life and Art, Arun Ghose, Gallerie 88, 2007
- ^ Manifestations II, Rabina Karode, Delhi Art Gallery 2004, ISBN 81-902104-0-8
- ^ A Guide to 101 Modern and Contemporary Indian Artists, Amrita Jhaveri, India Book House, 2005 ISBN 81-7508-423-5
- ^ Vadehra Art Gallery, 20th Century Museum of Contemporary Art Archived 18 October 2016 at the Wayback Machine.
- ^ Delhi Art Gallery.
- ^ "South Asian art including property from the Dartington Hall Trust". Sotheby's.
External links
- "Somnath Hore Profile, Interview and Artworks"
- 20th Century Museum of Contemporary Indian Art
- On the Artnet
- Centre of International Modern Art
- Tebhaga sketches and woodcuts
- Collection of Indian Printmaking
- v
- t
- e
- V. K. Aatre
- Anil Agarwal
- Ram Narain Agarwal
- Sharan Rani Backliwal
- Swami Kalyandev
- Veerendra Heggade
- Pavaguda V. Indiresan
- Wahiduddin Khan
- B. B. Lal
- Raghunath Anant Mashelkar
- H. Y. Sharada Prasad
- Rajinikanth
- Begum Aizaz Rasul
- Radha Reddy
- Raja Reddy
- Pakkiriswamy Chandra Sekharan
- Karamshi Jethabhai Somaiya
- S. Srinivasan
- Ratan Tata
- Harbans Singh Wasir
- Dev Anand
- Viswanathan Anand
- Amitabh Bachchan
- Rahul Bajaj
- B. R. Barwale
- Balasaheb Bharde
- Boyi Bhimanna
- Swadesh Chatterjee
- B. R. Chopra
- Ashok Desai
- K. M. George
- Bhupen Hazarika
- Lalgudi Jayaraman
- Yamini Krishnamurthy
- Shiv K. Kumar
- Raghunath Mohapatra
- Arun Netravali
- Mohan Singh Oberoi
- Rajendra K. Pachauri
- Abdul Karim Parekh
- Amrita Patel
- Pran
- Aroon Purie
- B. V. Raju
- P. Bhanumathi
- Sundaram Ramakrishnan
- Chitranjan Singh Ranawat
- Palle Rama Rao
- Raj Reddy
- Uma Sharma
- L. Subramaniam
- Naresh Trehan
- Gary Ackerman
- H. P. S. Ahluwalia
- Prabha Atre
- Sushantha Kumar Bhattacharyya
- Chandu Borde
- Eugene Chelyshev
- Pravinchandra Varjivan Gandhi
- Shobha Gurtu
- Henning Holck-Larsen
- Zakir Hussain
- B. K. S. Iyengar
- F. C. Kohli
- V. C. Kulandaiswamy
- Gury Marchuk
- Jagat Singh Mehta
- Ismail Merchant
- Mario Miranda
- Frank Pallone
- Ramanujam Varatharaja Perumal
- Natesan Rangabashyam
- Maharaja Krishna Rasgotra
- Habib Tanvir
- K. K. Venugopal
- Nirmal Verma
- K. J. Yesudas
- Teejan Bai
- Ammannur Madhava Chakyar
- Prabhu Chawla
- Herbert Fischer
- Jamshyd Godrej
- Coluthur Gopalan
- K. Parasaran
- B. Rajam Iyer
- Shri Krishna Joshi
- Madurai Narayanan Krishnan
- Rajinder Kumar
- Ramesh Kumar
- Purshotam Lal
- Sitakant Mahapatra
- Bagicha Singh Minhas
- Subhash Mukhopadhyay
- P. S. Narayanaswamy
- Arcot Ramachandran
- Trichur V. Ramachandran
- Kantilal Hastimal Sancheti
- T. V. Sankaranarayanan
- Naseeruddin Shah
- T. V. R. Shenoy
- Jagjit Singh
- Ram Badan Singh
- Hari Shankar Singhania
- Umayalpuram K. Sivaraman
- Narayanan Srinivasan
- Padma Subrahmanyam
- Swapna Sundari
- O. V. Vijayan
- Herbert Alexandrovich Yefremov
- Thoppil Varghese Antony
- Soumitra Chatterjee
- Chandrashekhar Shankar Dharmadhikari
- Gulzar
- Sardara Singh Johl
- M. V. Kamath
- Komal Kothari
- Yoshirō Mori
- Gopi Chand Narang
- Govindarajan Padmanaban
- Poornima Arvind Pakvasa
- Vishnu Prabhakar
- N. Rajam
- C. H. Hanumantha Rao
- Thiruvengadam Lakshman Sankar
- T. N. Seshagopalan
- Bijoy Nandan Shahi
- Krishna Srinivas
- Alarmel Valli
- Sardar Anjum
- André Beteille
- Chandi Prasad Bhatt
- Tumkur Ramaiya Satishchandran
- Mrinal Datta Chaudhuri
- Yash Chopra
- Manna Dey
- Irfan Habib
- Yusuf Hamied
- Qurratulain Hyder
- Tarlochan Singh Kler
- Anil Kohli
- Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw
- Mrinal Miri
- Hari Mohan
- Brijmohan Lall Munjal
- M. T. Vasudevan Nair
- Azim Premji
- Balraj Puri
- Syed Mir Qasim
- A. Ramachandran
- G. V. Iyer Ramakrishna
- V. S. Ramamurthy
- K. I. Varaprasad Reddy
- K. Srinath Reddy
- Girish Chandra Saxena
- Narasimaiah Seshagiri
- Mark Tully
- Jaiveer Agarwal
- P. S. Appu
- Shashi Bhushan
- Ganga Prasad Birla
- Grigory Bongard-Levin
- Lokesh Chandra
- Chiranjeevi
- Dinesh Nandini Dalmia
- Tarun Das
- Madhav Gadgil
- A. K. Hangal
- Devaki Jain
- Kamleshwar
- Abdul Halim Jaffer Khan
- Sabri Khan
- Ghulam Mustafa Khan
- Shanno Khurana
- Gunter Kruger
- P. Leela
- K. P. P. Nambiar
- Nandan Nilekani
- Sai Paranjpye
- Deepak Parekh
- M. V. Pylee
- Subramaniam Ramadorai
- N. S. Ramaswamy
- Pavani Parameswara Rao
- Ramakanta Rath
- V. Shanta
- Hira Lall Sibal
- Billy Arjan Singh
- Jasjit Singh
- Vijaypat Singhania
- K. G. Subramanyan
- K. K. Talwar
- Vijay Shankar Vyas
- Dušan Zbavitel
- Javed Akhtar
- Gabriel Chiramel
- Ela Gandhi
- Saroj Ghose
- V. Mohini Giri
- Somnath Hore
- Jamshed Jiji Irani
- Gurcharan Singh Kalkat
- N. Mahalingam
- Prithipal Singh Maini
- Tyeb Mehta
- Rajan and Sajan Mishra
- Rajan and Sajan Mishra
- Sunil Mittal
- Ramankutty Nair
- Gopaldas Neeraj
- Indra Nooyi
- Kavalam Narayana Panicker
- Bhikhu Parekh
- Syed Mohammad Sharfuddin Quadri
- V. S. Ramachandran
- Tapan Raychaudhuri
- S. H. Raza
- Jeffrey Sachs
- Chandra Prasad Saikia
- L. Z. Sailo
- Shiv Kumar Sarin
- Shriram Sharma
- Manju Sharma
- T. N. Srinivasan
- Osamu Suzuki
- K. T. Thomas
- Mian Bashir Ahmed
- Kaushik Basu
- Shayama Chona
- Jagjit Singh Chopra
- Rahim Fahimuddin Dagar
- Chandrashekhar Dasgupta
- Asis Datta
- Meghnad Desai
- Padma Desai
- Sukh Dev
- Nirmal Kumar Ganguly
- B. N. Goswamy
- Vasant Gowarikar
- Baba Kalyani
- K. V. Kamath
- Inderjit Kaur Barthakur
- Ravindra Kelekar
- Asad Ali Khan
- Dominique Lapierre
- D. R. Mehta
- Shiv Nadar
- Suresh Kumar Neotia
- T. K. Oommen
- K. Padmanabhaiah
- Vikram Pandit
- V. Ramachandran
- Sushil Kumar Saxena
- Amarnath Sehgal
- Jasdev Singh
- Shrilal Shukla
- P. Susheela
- S. R. Srinivasa Varadhan
- Yuli Vorontsov
- Sunita Williams
- Ji Xianlin
- Isher Judge Ahluwalia
- Inderjit Kaur Barthakur
- Shamshad Begum
- Abhinav Bindra
- Shanta Dhananjayan
- V. P. Dhananjayan
- Ramachandra Guha
- Shekhar Gupta
- Khalid Hameed
- Minoru Hara
- Jayakanthan
- Thomas Kailath
- Sarvagya Singh Katiyar
- G. Krishna
- R. C. Mehta
- A. Sreedhara Menon
- S. K. Misra
- A. M. Naik
- Satish Nambiar
- Kunwar Narayan
- Nagnath Naikwadi
- Kirit Parikh
- Sam Pitroda
- C. K. Prahalad
- Gurdip Singh Randhawa
- Brijendra Kumar Rao
- Bhakta B. Rath
- C. S. Seshadri
- V. Ganapati Sthapati
- Devendra Triguna
- Sarojini Varadappan
- 1954–1959
- 1960–1969
- 1970–1979
- 1980–1989
- 1990–1999
- 2000–2009
- 2010–2019
- 2020–2029