Ram Kumar (b.1924)

Sotheby's New York, 17 September 2009, lot 18

This painting is in good condition, as viewed.
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Ram Kumar was born in Simla and later moved to New Delhi where he studied art under the tutelage of Sailoz Mookherjea. Like several first generation postcolonial Indian artists, such as Francis Newton Souza and Sayed Haider Raza, he was struck by a desire for global success yet retained his need to belong emphatically to his homeland.  In 1950, he left for Paris where he became part of the communist circle of intelligentsia, regularly attending meetings and demonstrations but later returned to India.

In 1961 Ram Kumar visited the holy city of Varanasi, which resulted in a significant shift in his painterly style.  He sought to capture the haunted nature of his experience in a novel way. Moving away from figuration, he started to paint a series of landscapes devoid of the usual constituents of reality, and where the human figure is noticeably absent. 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. This new expression of lines and forms and the orchestration of colour began in the 1960's and continued to appear in his paintings for many years.

Over the decades Ram Kumar's paintings moved towards pure abstraction and the elements of the landscape itself were reduced to barely recognizable forms, juxtaposed in shifting vertical and horizontal planes.  The foreground and background are compressed into a series of lines yet there is a still a hint of the houses that line the cityscape. The dramatic shift in Ram Kumar’s palette and preferred style during this period has a strong correlation to the natural world—conceptualized through something as basic as the negative spaces between buildings, transitioning from the painterly concerns of urban life to the spaciousness of the earth and sky. In this work, vivid blues stand out in stark contrast with the monochromatic city, making the viewer very aware of the divide between the natural and the man-made.