Portrait of a sculptor Somnath Hore

Somnath Hore was born in a village called Barama in Chittagong in present day Bangladesh in
1921. He was very young when he started creating posters for the Communist party. The leader of
the Communist party helped Hore get admitted into the Government College of Art & Craft.

Between the years 1954 to 1967, Hore handled a number of jobs in various capacities. From 1954 to
1958 he was a lecturer at the Indian College of Art and Draftsmanship in Kolkata. Thereafter, until
1967, he held posts such as the “in-charge of the Graphic section” at the Delhi College of Art, visiting
faculty at the MS University in Baroda and the head of the Graphic Art department of Kala Bhavan,
Visva Bharati. In 1960, he became a member of the Society of Contemporary Artists.

From 1974, Hore began doing bronze sculptures. The anguished human form has widely been
reflected in Hore’s figuration.

Legacy
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.