Ram Kumar (b.1924)

Acquired by the present owner's father in India in 1959

Minor cracking in paint in upper and lower left canvas. Exposed areas of canvas along left and right edges of painting not visible in catalogue illustration. Could benefit from restretching. Overall good condition. Colors slightly deeper and fresher than catalogue illustration.
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From the mid-1950's Ram Kumar produced a series of figurative works that in part provide a commentary on the despair experienced by so many in post-Independence urban India. His forlorn figures stare out of bleak urban landscapes and reflect the emotional states of the characters he portrays in his first fictional work of 1953, Ghar Bane Ghar Toote. '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 millions of people soon after Independence.' (Alok Bhalla, Introductory Essay, The Sea and Other Stories by Ram Kumar, Shimla, 1997, p. xv).

However, over the course of the 1960's Ram Kumar's work veered towards pure abstraction and by the end of the decade the elements of his landscapes had been reduced to barely recognizable forms juxtaposed in shifting vertical and horizontal planes. 'In the 1960's and 70's there is a radical shift 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 city landscapes he paints over these two decades, empty houses, which seem to collide with each other, are scratched out of black restless lines on brown and 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 a city of pilgrims, priests, temples and lights, but a city which is slowly sinking into primeval mud.' (ibid).

The current work from the late 1950's is highly unusual as it is a rare example of a later canvas where there are identifiable figures in the composition. The mournful stares and blank expressions of the three central figures reflect the mood of the earlier figurative canvases, but the style of the work reflects the austerity of color and line that becomes a hallmark of Ram Kumar's landscapes from the 1960's. The geometric forms contained within the bodies of the figures reflect the colliding shapes that appear in his Varanasi series and later landscapes. Some critics have commented that by ridding his canvases of the characters he portrayed in his writing he allowed himself the freedom to follow independent paths in his two chosen art forms. As a writer he remains focused on social concerns whilst as a painter he expresses a more personal vision of the world, nonetheless the two art forms continue to share certain common characteristics and in the current example his concerns of both art forms once again coincide.

'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).

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.' (Ranjit Hoskote, "The Poet of the Visionary Landscape," in Ram Kumar, A Journey Within, Vadehra Art Gallery, 1996, p. 37). 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.