In her memoirs, Amar Katha: Kichhu Michhu (My Story: Bits and Pieces), published after her death in 2008, artist Reba Hore mentions her husband, artist Somnath Hore, and their daughter, artist Chandana Hore, for the first time in an unusual manner. “Both of us in the family are engaged in the same profession (now all the three of us),” she writes. No names are mentioned; no introductions offered.
This is no oblique way of understating the far greater stature that Somnath (1921-2006) had achieved by this time. But Reba did not care. What she did care about—always, without a choice—was carving out her own identity as an artist. In the gentlest but fiercest way, she would not be defined against anyone else.
It is not easy to live with a formidable reputation, especially when you are an artist of enormous talent; it is even more difficult when your partner is your comrade, in art, life and politics, as Somnath was to Reba. “Who am I?” are the restless opening words of her memoirs. “What is my identity?”
Reba enters her centennial year in 2026, but her power as an artist, the emotion and deep humanity in which her art is rooted, have only just begun to be recognised. Several exhibitions of her work have marked the centenary. The Seagull Foundation for the Arts held two, one in Kolkata and the other in Bengaluru. In Kolkata, Debovasha gallery’s extensive show Reba Hore’s Birth Centenary Exhibition featured more than a hundred of her works from different stages.
The subject of Reba’s art is everyday life. It stands out for its use of vibrant, often visceral, colours, bringing to the images an extraordinary emotional intensity, heightened often by sharp, jagged crayon lines criss-crossing in the background, making the frames fraught.
Kolkata-based Chandana, 62, speaks about Reba’s “nervous lines”. The figure may be of a sparrow, a dog, a woman, or a flower, but something larger seems to be struggling within them.
Chandana compares her mother to nature. “Ma had inside her a force that was like a large landscape, or a huge wave,” she tells Lounge. This force was always trying to break through the images. “I feel her paintings carry her body.”
A meeting of minds
Reba was born on 7 May 1926, in a distinguished Bengali family in Calcutta (now Kolkata). As an adolescent, she travelled to Europe with her family and also lived by the river Padma, now in Bangladesh.
As a young woman in Kolkata, Reba witnessed the horrors of the Bengal famine of 1943 and then the riots of Partition, which would stay with her forever. She met Somnath as a fellow student after she joined the Government College of Art and Craft in Kolkata in 1946. Unlike Reba, he came from a poor family. He was already a member of the Communist Party. Reba, too, got a formal membership of the party in 1948, “as an activist of the ‘Artist’s Front’”. The first time they spoke was when Somnath asked Reba to contribute money to help tram workers.
Somnath’s works from this period are haunting reminders of the horrors of the famine: sketches and prints of faces emptied of flesh, a child sheltered by the mother, her body is just protruding bones. The couple both left the Communist Party later, as they felt that party rules should not regiment an artist’s life.
But they remained committed to the ideology, living in the plainest possible way, devoting their lives to others, “accepting poverty”, as Chandana puts it. She remembers her mother always serving food to someone or the other. Santhal people from the villages were regular visitors to their Santiniketan home. They also appeared in her parents’ works.
“My parents were comrades,” Chandana says. “These two would absorb all the world’s grief into themselves.” The Hores were shattered by the violence of the Naxalite movement and the Bangladesh Liberation War in the 1970s.
“My father’s melancholy came from the failure of human society. It was vast and conceptual,” says Chandana. “My mother was deeply moved by her surroundings. There is a deep sadness in this, too. Physicality brings a sadness, because it (the mortal life?) is going to end,” says Chandana.
Her parents never competed but Reba worried she had fallen behind, despite starting out with Somnath. She had to relocate twice as her husband changed jobs. Naturally shy and solitary, she did not find it easy to adjust to new places.
Reba’s career got a tremendous boost when in 1958, while the Hores still lived in Kolkata, she received a National Award from Lalit Kala Akademi. It was unexpected: this was the first time an artist, not to mention a woman, from Bengal was getting it. Reba was only 32.
The same year Somnath got a job at Delhi Polytechnic College, where he was asked to set up the graphics department. Reba went with him but was pained to leave her beloved Kolkata, its warmth and love and conviviality, surrounded as she was by family and artist friends.
Reba and Somnath had held an exhibition together in the city in 1954, perhaps the only major joint one in their lifetime, and it had been exhilarating. Reba was also leaving her job at the Diocesan school in Kolkata, where she had found teaching art to children rewarding.
Art as life
Delhi, at first, felt cold and harsh. Somnath was busy. Reba felt lonely. She stopped painting. But then she decided to give herself “a good shake-up”. She was doing too many things and was beginning to look conventional.
“A realisation dawned on me that a painting need not be a poster; its impetus must come from the lives of ordinary people,” Reba writes in her memoirs. She remembered how the eminent Bangladeshi artist Zainul Abedin—popularly called Master moshai (teacher)—had explained to her the relationship between space and mass. This was a foundational idea for her work.
All her life Reba worked relentlessly, ceaselessly seeking herself through her art. Somnath worked compulsively, too, but Chandana saw more of her mother, since Reba, despite being a prolific artist, stayed home.
“From the time I was very small I had realised that 99 per cent of my mother’s existence was devoted to painting and one per cent to managing the household, though she loved family life,” writes Chandana in her account of her life with her parents, Jibanbandhane (Bound to Life), published in 2025.
“I have not left this work even to fulfil my responsibilities towards my family and my child,” Reba wrote in her memoir. “And it has always given me a sense of fulfilment and liberation.” Which is what she wanted, not fame or recognition.
Not that her indifference to domesticity stopped Reba from being an extremely loving, caring mother. But she had not taken a break even as a new mother. Chandana was born in 1964. Reba’s pregnancy was late—she was 38 when she gave birth—and unexpected. She was overjoyed, but because of her age, the pregnancy took its toll on her health.
“The overwhelming feeling of love for a child, which spills over into everything else, sought expression. I felt that even a little bit of work would make me feel less tired. So, despite thousands of chores, I would make drawings,” she writes. During the decade that Reba spent in Delhi, her work was rich and colourful.
In the late 1960s, Reba and Somnath moved to Santiniketan, following Somnath’s appointment at Kala Bhavana in Visva Bharati. Santiniketan would be home for the family for almost four decades. They would live in many houses there. Understandably, journeying became a theme of Reba’s works.
“For 16-18 hours every day, I would see my mother either preparing the medium or straightening canvas. In the middle of it she would somehow prepare some food and go back to work again,” Chandana writes in Jibanbandhane, recalling their life in Santiniketan. Reba began to prepare her medium with eggs and pigment when she developed an allergic reaction to oil paint.
Chandana tells Lounge about a series of large oils painted called Picnic, which were all done by her mother in Santiniketan. Made in the 1970s, they were partly inspired by the picnics the family had in the forest areas in and around Santiniketan. Chandana remembers these outings as joyful. “They were done in bright colours—green, red. Those paintings are powerful with the presence of many,” says Chandana. “They had in them a sense of going out, journeying.”
A recurring motif
“The journey features again and again in Reba Hore’s work,” explains Saurav De, co-founder of Debovasha. “The people in the paintings (from the Picnic series) are going somewhere... Colours flow out of the frame, red, blue, green and yellow, and in the background, we see hectic cross-hatching, with straight lines charging up, or clashing with one another.”
Did the theme of journeying, especially the journey of life, signify displacement for Reba? The presence of a group suggests a community, which was an intrinsic part of her and Somnath’s philosophy.
“Reba’s images combine the figurative and the abstract, even as her works fuse her personal struggle with the struggle of life itself,” says Debojyoti Mukhopadhyay, co-founder of Debovasha gallery. “A dog running at a furious speed. Two hens tearing away at each other. The sharp claw marks, the intense lines of the crayons….”
Every now and then, artists and cultural personalities would visit. Benode Behari Mukhopadhyay (1904-80) and Somnath were very close, as were Ramkinkar Baij (1906-80) and Reba.
“Santiniketan was the thriving centre of the work of that generation,” says Chandana. “Tyebda (Tyeb Mehta, 1925-2009) was there, so was Manida (K.G. Subramanyan, 1924-2016). Jogenda (Jogen Chowdhury, b. 1939) had just joined Kala Bhavana (in 1987). There was Sanatda (Sanat Kar, 1935-2023).”
Then, there were the villagers. Their hard lives and their grief-stricken faces appear in Reba’s work, including in the small terracotta figures. She would be concerned about the nutrition of the Santhal women, enquire if they had eaten.
But Santiniketan also shrank Reba’s life. Somnath had his life outside, but unlike in Kolkata or Delhi, Reba’s life was restricted to the four walls. “Perhaps the solitude was good for her art,” says Chandana, “but Santiniketan can be very claustrophobic.”
Reba also felt the need to protect herself from Somnath’s growing stature. If it struck her that a visitor wanted to see Somnath’s work primarily, she would withdraw at once.
Art historian R. Siva Kumar, who met Reba in Santiniketan, remembers how reclusive she was. He was struck by the clarity of her thoughts.
“There is a tenderness in her work. Some of it is remarkable,” he says. He feels Reba would probably have benefited as an artist if she were less isolated. “She did not participate in the art space. Being aware of others’ works keeps an artist alive,” he explains.
Since Reba was prolific—and “slightly impulsive”—as an artist, strict editing is essential to show her work, says Siva Kumar. “That would mean presenting her in her strength.” But most exhibitions of her work have not achieved that balance, he feels.
Towards the end of Reba’s life, Naveen Kishore of The Seagull Foundation for the Arts had organised one. “She felt very encouraged after seeing it,” says Chandana. “Naveen also published a facsimile edition of her paintings and notes, titled Bhanga Payer Diary (“Diary of Broken Feet”), which was wonderful, too.”
But Reba felt that she had not done enough. “I could not give myself completely to my work, gave myself more to others,’’ Chandana recalls her mother saying. “Others meant my father,” says Chandana.
At the same time Reba would say: “I have no regrets because this enriched my life.” When Somnath was on his deathbed, she drew him obsessively.
Secret language
Chandana does not think gender kept Reba from her work in any way, but one is left to wonder. She had to move when Somnath found new work, she looked after the household, and she stayed at home.
Early on, the couple had decided that if one of them was earning substantially, the other would not take up a job—they felt someone else, who needed the job more, should get it instead. Between Reba and Somnath, Somnath was the one who always worked professionally.
For Chandana, her mother stays with her through her works. Reba’s works, especially the oils, remind her of her mother’s body, as do the sky, and certain fabric. “Whenever I feel lost, and I see a large expanse of the sky, or a soft, blue sari, I understand—viscerally—she is there,” says Chandana. Reba held on to her mother’s saris after her death; Chandana holds on to Reba’s now.
“I had asked my mother where I would go when she was not there. She told me that nature is another mother; be at one with her,” says Chandana. “Women need to remain connected with another woman’s body. My mother knew that.”
Reba’s works are not only her physical presence. They are also a secret left for an artist daughter. “She has left a language for me in her oil paintings and drawings,” Chandana says. “But I have to look for it. For that, I have to be in the practice. I have to empty the canvas to get to that language. In the direst of times, I find it. Like nature, my mother didn’t reveal everything,” she says.
As Reba’s life was drawing to a close, her lines and colours became finer and more intense. “A lame dog, a hen with a torn wing or screaming, an old woman fruit-seller wielding a stick, all these scenes from around her were now caught in very fine lines. As if someone, about to depart, was writing her memoirs,” Chandana says.
“I believe my mother was more concerned with life than with death.”
Chandrima S. Bhattacharya is a journalist based in Kolkata.