Ram Kumar (b. 1924)

Light craquelure throughout painting especially apparent in upper quadrant. Otherwise canvas appears in good overall condition. Colors brighter than catalogue illustration.
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The current work belongs to the series of paintings from the early 1960's where Ram Kumar draws on the city of Varanasi for his inspiration.  Unlike the depictions of the city by British artists in pre-independence India who present an Orientalist vision of a holy city filled with pilgrims, priests and temples Kumar presents us with a more personal internalized vision of the city.

 

'As a painter, however, he is more like a pilgrim longing for illumination.  His canvases reveal, despite the scenes of occasional horror that they depict, a painter who intuitively knows that there are still intimations of benevolence in the world which are enough to carry on with the business of living. Ram Kumar's early figurative paintings are harsh, angry and realistic.  They are responses to the personal and historical difficulties of the decade after Partition.  The figures he paints of refugees or of urban squatters displaced from their village homes, are scarred and diseased, emotionally shattered and lonely.  The paintings of this period should be read as ironic parables of the defeat, humiliation and ruin that became the fate of the millions of people soon after Independence.

'In the 1960's and 70's there is a radical change in  Ram Kumar's work.  The paintings continue to be austere and anguished, but they cease to include human figures.  It is as if he decides to give up on man and his social fate, and tries to find his own solitary path towards vision. The quest is hard and long.  In the citylandscapes he paints over these two decades, empty houses, which seem to collide with each other, are scratched out of black restless lines on brown grey backgrounds.  There is no sky to lighten the melancholy and no trees to break the monotony of stone and earth.  Even Varanasi which he paints obsessively, is not the city of pilgrims, priests, temples and lights, but a city which is slowly sinking into primeaval mud.'  (Alok Bhalla, Introductory Essay, The Sea and Other Stories by Ram Kumar, Shimla, 1997, p. xv).