Important Notice

The present lot is an unusual work from Ram Kumar's early Benaras paintings. The small size and the textured brown background, which veers towards maroon, are both rare in his oeuvre. As is now well known, a trip to Varanasi with Husain in 1960 was a defining moment in Ram Kumar's life. The city of death and rebirth supplied Kumar with a new exposure to human suffering and he sought to portray the despondence and torment through increasingly... The present lot is an unusual work from Ram Kumar's early Benaras paintings. The small size and the textured brown background, which veers towards maroon, are both rare in his oeuvre. As is now well known, a trip to Varanasi with Husain in 1960 was a defining moment in Ram Kumar's life. The city of death and rebirth supplied Kumar with a new exposure to human suffering and he sought to portray the despondence and torment through increasingly abstract depictions of the city.

His paintings from this period were characterised by their gaunt, dark colour palette, as seen in the present lot. "The years from 1960-64 comprised a predominantly "grey" period, the sternest and more austere in his career. Using the encaustic process Ram even delved into shades of black. Greys derived from blues and browns set off the facets of the textures, the drifts, the engulfed landforms, the isthmus shapes and the general theme of the fecund but desolate landscape." (Richard Bartholomew, "The Abstract as a Pictorial Proposition," Gagan Gill ed., Ram Kumar: A Journey Within, New Delhi: Vadehra Art Gallery, 1996, p. 30) Th e present lot presents just such a Cubist patchwork of riverbank buildings which seem to float on the maroon backdrop with no suggestion of water or sky, invoking isolation that is without scale or mooring.

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