Important Notice

On the journey from the figurative to the abstract, Ram Kumar progressed through several phases during his career. As an art student in Paris, and in the company of the capital's leftist intellectual circles, Kumar's early paintings focussed on the lost souls of the modern industrialised city. However, from playing an important role in the drama of his paintings in the 1950s, the figure was to be completely eliminated from his works in the... On the journey from the figurative to the abstract, Ram Kumar progressed through several phases during his career. As an art student in Paris, and in the company of the capital's leftist intellectual circles, Kumar's early paintings focussed on the lost souls of the modern industrialised city. However, from playing an important role in the drama of his paintings in the 1950s, the figure was to be completely eliminated from his works in the following decade. His use of imagery underwent a process of gradual clarification and refinement. In the 1960s, he turned to landscapes which were to become bearers of the emotive in his art.

A trip in 1960 to Varanasi, the city of death and rebirth, supplied Kumar with a new exposure to human suffering that lay at the intersection of faith and torment. With this new turn, he sought to liberate reality from its human context. His early Varanasi works present a somewhat more realistic depiction of the city and its patchwork of riverbank buildings. The present lot suggests an aerial view of homes represented as tightly-packed squares perched on the banks of the river. "Ram Kumar addressed himself to the formal aberrations of mismatched planes, jamming the horizontal perspective against top views inspired by site-mapping and aerial photography, and locking the muddy, impasto-built riverbank constructions into a Cubist geometrical analysis. Gradually, the architecture drained away from his canvasses: society itself passed from his concerns, until, during the late 1960s, his paintings assumed the character of abstractionist hymns to nature." (Ranjit Hoskote, Ram Kumar: Recent Works, Saffronart and Pundole Art Gallery, May - July 2002, p.6)

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