Ram Kumar (b. 1924)

Gagan Gill (ed.), Ram Kumar, A Journey Within, New Delhi, 1996, p.106 illustrated

 

Painting appears to have been recently cleaned and varnished. Overall good condition. Blues in catalogue illustration slightly oversaturated.
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From the mid 1950's Ram Kumar produced a series of figurative works that provide a visual commentary to the despair experienced by so many in post-Independence urban India. His forlorn figures stare out of bleak urban landscapes, but in 1961 he visits Varanasi and a change appears in his work. 'I had gone to Banaras [Varanasi] for the first time about 35 years ago.  It was in the middle of winter.  And I had reached late at night.  The dimly lit lanes were deserted and gave an impression of a ghostly deserted city.  Except for the occasional howl of stray dogs, all was quiet.  I thought the city was only inhabited by the dead and their dead souls.  It looked like a haunted place and still remains the same.  The main purpose of coming to Banaras was to feel its depth and intensity.  I had to see and feel the city in terms of lines and forms with a new visual experience.'  (Ram Kumar in Ram Kumar a Journey Within, New Delhi, 1996, p. 89).

His Varanasi series marks a significant shift in his work, from his figurative phase to a semi-abstracted world where the human figure is noticeably absent reflecting his first experience of the deserted night time streets of the city. 'By banishing the figure... Ram Kumar was able to emphasize the nullification of humanity, and to deploy architecture and landscape as metaphors articulating cultural and psychological fragmentation.'(Ranjit Hoskote in Ram Kumar: A Journey Within, New Delhi, 1996, p. 37).  The artist's choice of the sacred city as the catalyst and inspiration for this move away from the figurative style is conceptually coherent; Hindus believe that death or cremation in this holy city leads to liberation rather than rebirth in another form and in some ways these sentiments are reflected in the transition in Kumar's work from figuration to abstraction. The artist admits that his experience of the city blurred the boundary lines between life and death but in visual terms it seems this is expressed in his painting by a blurring of the boundary lines between form and abstraction. ' Wandering along the ghats in a vast sea of humanity, I saw faces like masks bearing marks of suffering and pain, similar to the blocks, doors and windows, jutting out of dilapidated old houses, palaces, temples. The labyrinths of lanes and by-lanes of the city hundreds of old boats – I almost saw a new world, very strange yet very familiar, very much my own.' (Ram Kumar in Ram Kumar: A Journey Within, New Delhi, 1996, p. 89).

The dramatic intensity of his early figurative paintings is retained in these canvases, but the works attain a kind of austere brilliance, a certain ascetic purity. 'Every sight was like a new composition, a still life artistically organized to be interpreted in colors. It was not merely outward appearances which were fascinating but they were vibrant with an inner life of their own, very deep and profound, which left an everlasting impression on my artistic sensibility. I could feel a new visual language emerging from the depths of an experience.' (ibid.)  This crystallizing of forms that begins in the 1960's is an artistic journey that continues in his paintings for many years, a process whereby form and the orchestration of color becomes central to the artistic process.  Yet the paintings themselves retain the urge to express the desolation or loss that the artist so frequently witnesses in the lives of those around him. 

'There is a visionary link between his paintings and his stories. Both are characterized by an asceticism of form. If there are no extravagant lines in his drawings, there are no melodramatic gestures in his stories. The melancholic stillness that settles over his city landscape is analogous to the arid silence that separates the characters he creates. The severe beauty of colors in his sketchbooks finds its equivalent in the sad cadence of sentence in his writing. His landscapes are remote, alien, threatening; his stories are sad, troubled and brooding.' (Alok Bhalla, Introductory Essay, The Sea and Other stories by Ram Kumar, Shimla, 1997, p. ix).