My Concept of Art

Somnath Hore

Translated by Somnath Zutshi

 

7 x 7 inches, 72pp, Illustrated throughout 2009

ISBN : 9788170463429

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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.

Somnath Hore (b. 1921, in Baroma, Chittagong) taught at Indian Art College and Delhi Polytechnic before coming to teach at Kala Bhavana, Santiniketan. Also Visiting Lecturer at M. S. University, Baroda, for a short time, Hore worked in various media—print-making, drawing and watercolour—before turning to sculpture in his later years. Author of Tebhaga Diary and Aamar Chitro Bhabona, Hore received the Padma Bhushan (posthumously), the Aban-Gagan Puroshkar, the Lalit Kala Ratna and the Rabindra Bharati University Award, among many others. Hore lived and worked in Santiniketan until his death in 2006. 

 

Somnath Zutshi was a psychonanalyst by training who studied and wrote extensively on cinema. He has also translated works by Somnath Hore and Mrinal Sen.

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