Somnath Hore

[2] Hore learned the methods and nuances of printmaking, mainly lithography and intaglio, at the Government College of Art and Craft in Calcutta.

[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.

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.

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] In the early 1950s Hore's drawings and his Tebhaga series of woodcuts show the influence of Chinese Socialist Realism and German Expressionism.

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.