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“As I began to paint, the landscapes came naturally and gradually, the outlines faded into abstracts... There is an enigmatic mystery about the inner life of a colour applied on canvas. It stands out by itself in the beginning but slowly it starts building up relationships with other areas, other colours, and forms. This continues. There is a pause, a silence, an accident and in the end some sort of harmony.”
– RAM KUMAR

There... “As I began to paint, the landscapes came naturally and gradually, the outlines faded into abstracts... There is an enigmatic mystery about the inner life of a colour applied on canvas. It stands out by itself in the beginning but slowly it starts building up relationships with other areas, other colours, and forms. This continues. There is a pause, a silence, an accident and in the end some sort of harmony.”
– RAM KUMAR

There is a quiet poignancy in the present lot that has been typical of Ram Kumar’s art throughout his career, from his forlorn figures of alienated, city-dwelling men and women surrounded by industrial despair to his abstract landscapes, characterised by fragmented colour planes that evoked a meditative stillness. “Among Indian painters today Ram Kumar is perhaps the only one who has no imitators and no followers, for both his themes and his method are simple. They are so simple and sincere that imitation is practically impossible.” (Richard Bartholomew, Hindustan Times Weekly, 23 October 1955, reproduced in Rati Bartholomew, Pablo Bartholomew, Carmen Kagal and Rosalyn D’Mello eds., Richard Bartholomew: The Art Critic, New Delhi: BART, 2012, p. 313)

The present lot was painted in 1962, a time when “abstraction and expressionism, if these did not actually alternate in Ram’s paintings, happened to get varying emphasis.” (Richard Bartholomew, “The Abstract As A Pictorial Proposition,” Gagan Gill ed., Ram Kumar: A Journey Within, New Delhi: Vadehra Art Gallery, 1996, p. 33). He had moved from the figurative works of the previous decade to increasingly abstract renderings of cities that were imbibed with a universality that transcended known geographies and created a sense of timelessness. “In the years between 1960-64 Ram used for his imagery architecture, houses, lanes, shadows, reflections—in short structure itself, whatever man constructed— as the basis for an abstract formulation... As this got further sublimated—and became the far view, for instance—the sweeping panorama became paramount, as perspective and as perception. At that time Ram took an expansive view of nature, a kind of bird’s eye view...” (Ibid, pp. 29-30)

The cities he encountered during his travels at this time also contributed to the evolution of his landscapes. In 1959, Kumar visited Greece for the first time, where the white houses set against a blue sky inspired him to paint his Greek Landscape series of four paintings. Kumar then moved to Simla in 1959 and began painting landscapes.

His visit to Varanasi in 1961 would become a turning point for the artist. In this ancient city, Kumar was exposed to a wholly new kind of human suffering that lay at the intersection of faith and torment. He began making sketches of the Ghats, devoid of human figures, using wax and ink, and would base the sacred site as the central focus of many of his works thereafter. Rather than a literal representation of the sights around him, his depictions were emotive, negotiating the forms of the landscape with the increasingly abstract depictions of built forms and water. “Benares is important for me both as an artist and as a human being. The first paintings came at a point when I wanted to develop elements in figurative painting and go beyond it. My first visit to the city invoked an emotional reaction as it had peculiar associations. But such romantic ideas were dispelled when I came face to face with reality. There was so much pain and sorrow of humanity. As an artist, it became a challenge to portray this agony and suffering. Its intensity required the use of symbolic motifs, so my Benares is of a representative sort.” (Seema Bawa, “Ram Kumar: Artistic Intensity of an Ascetic,” Art News & Views, online)

As evident in the present lot, his paintings from this period were characterised by their primarily gaunt, dark colour palette. “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.” (Bartholomew, p. 30)

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