Untitled

Studying briefly at the Government School of Art, Calcutta (now Kolkata), in the mid-1940s, Somnath Hore trained under the artist Zainul Abedin, and, later, the printmaker Safiuddin Ahmed. Hore chose a distinctly formal, Western style of artmaking, distinguished by its strong linear quality, and guided by humanist concerns as much as the need to depict the catastrophe-enduring figure. The 1943 Bengal famine and 1946 Tebhaga peasant uprising marked him, reappearing constantly in his works. Made between January and April of 1969, this artwork, the first of three prints, uses blacks, greys and reds to describe the squalor and unrest the artist witnessed within the city. A pair of dogs look as if they have been startled by a sound in the distance, reflecting the anxiety that had soaked even into the animal inhabitants of the city during the tumultuous decade of the 1940s.