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Lot 30

 

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“I wanted to develop elements in figurative painting and go beyond it.”
- RAM KUMAR

As with many of his contemporaries, the early 1950s saw Ram Kumar move to Paris to study art. Despite being under the tutelage of André Lhote and Fernard Léger, Kumar developed a style that was distinctly his own – one that continued to evolve with every passing decade, seldom emulated, owing to its idiosyncrasy.

His work through the 1950s... “I wanted to develop elements in figurative painting and go beyond it.”
- RAM KUMAR

As with many of his contemporaries, the early 1950s saw Ram Kumar move to Paris to study art. Despite being under the tutelage of André Lhote and Fernard Léger, Kumar developed a style that was distinctly his own – one that continued to evolve with every passing decade, seldom emulated, owing to its idiosyncrasy.

His work through the 1950s placed utmost focus on capturing the existential anguish of humanity. Kumar’s protagonists are shrouded in a sense of melancholy, reinforced by his sombre palette and Modigliani-esque forms. “As a young artist, Ram Kumar was captivated by, or rather obsessed with, the human face because of the ease and intensity with which it registers the drama of life. The sad, desperate, lonely, hopeless or lost faces, which fill the canvases of his early period, render with pathos his view of the human condition... There is no trace of seething rage nor any hint of a protest here. These men do not even need to speak to us. Their mere looks are enough to tell us all we want to know about them, all that has made them what they are. (Sham Lal, “Between Being and Nothingness,” Gagan Gill ed., Ram Kumar: A Journey Within, New Delhi: Vadehra Art Gallery, 1996, pp. 15 - 16)

In 1958, Kumar was briefly based in Paris, working out of a rented apartment he shared with fellow Progressive Artists’ Group member, S H Raza. Even as he mastered figuration during this decade, Kumar was slowly departing from these forms, and embracing landscape and abstraction in his art.

At the crux of this metamorphosis, lies the present lot. Painted in 1960, this work marks what would soon be recognised as the end of Kumar’s early figurative phase and his foray in abstraction, which would later be synonymous with his oeuvre itself. As explained by Nirmal Verma “The figure, which played so important a role in the entire drama of Ram’s odyssey, was already beating a retreat, slowly, hesitantly, receding into the margins, almost merging with the dark greys and browns of the horizons. And what till then only vaguely lurked in the background - the shadowy outlines of dilapidated houses, a floated glimpse of the city roofs, the vertical thrust of an electric pole suddenly surged forward, pushing the figures on to the edges, occupying the central stage, as it were…” (Nirmal Verma, “From Solitude to Salvation,” Gagan Gill ed., Ram Kumar: A Journey Within, New Delhi: Vadehra Art Gallery, 1996, pp. 23-24) The present lot, is thus an amalgamation of Kumar’s past works, complete with dour figures, elongated in the form and bearing the weight of despair combined with a glimpse of the artist’s abstract landscapes. Possibly one of the last works by Kumar to feature figurative forms, the present lot and the works that would follow, would exhault him to the status of one of India’s greatest modernists.

Ultimately, his sojourn to Varanasi in 1960 with M F Husain would act as a catalyst for Kumar’s artistic transition. As he explained, “Every sight was like a new composition, a life artistically organized to be interpreted in colors. It was not merely outward appearances which fascinating but they were vibrant with 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 depth of an experience.” (As quoted by the artist, Gagan Gill ed., Ram Kumar: A Journey Within, New Delhi: Vadehra Art Gallery, 1996, p. 89)

During his time there, Kumar switched to creating sketches in wax and Japanese ink. The subject of these works were the ghats, void of people, making the landscape his central focus. These works featured a somewhat realistic depiction of the ghats, within Kumar’s Cubist vocabulary. “Despite the hordes thronging its streets and ghats, the human figure is surprisingly conspicuous in its absence. The artist appears to have passed on the baton of essaying the human condition from human figures to architectural forms – the man-made structures now stand in for man himself. The temple city with its haphazard skyline too lends itself ideally to working out Kumar’s Cubist influences.” (Meera Menezes, Ram Kumar: Traversing the Landscape of the Mind, Mumbai: Saffronart, 2016, p. 11)

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