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Lot 10

 

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On his move to Paris in the 1950s, Ram Kumar, who was the consciously apolitical son of a bureaucrat in India, soon found himself enmeshed in a politically aware intellectual milieu. He was inducted through his friends into the left-leaning literary organisation Comité National des Écrivains or Committee of National Writers (CNE) and eventually became part of the French Communist Party.

His art at the time also reflected his... On his move to Paris in the 1950s, Ram Kumar, who was the consciously apolitical son of a bureaucrat in India, soon found himself enmeshed in a politically aware intellectual milieu. He was inducted through his friends into the left-leaning literary organisation Comité National des Écrivains or Committee of National Writers (CNE) and eventually became part of the French Communist Party.

His art at the time also reflected his politicisation and expressed a humanistic concern about capitalism’s underclass. Art critic Ranjit Hoskote notes, “He spent that decade, the first decade of India’s independence, perfecting an elegiac figuration imbued with the spirit of tragic modernism. Infused with an ideological fervour, he drew equally upon exemplars like Courbet, Rouault, Kathe Koliwitz and Edward Hopper, dedicating himself to the creation of an iconography of depression and victimhood.” (Ranjit Hoskote, “The Poet of the Visionary Landscape”, Gagan Gill ed., Ram Kumar: A Journey Within, New Delhi: Vadehra Art Gallery, 1996, p. 37)

Kumar’s initial pull to figuration can be attributed to his belief in the human face’s ability to register the intensity of experience. Lots 9 and 10, from the artist’s fruitful but short figurative period of the 1950s, display the characteristic lack of agency in his subjects of that era. In these watercolours, the subjects stand clustered in the foreground without any apparent purpose, looking listlessly in various directions with their arms positioned as if deep in thought or dismay. Kumar manipulates the human figure to bodily delineate the helplessness of the urban proletariat under the conditions of mid- century capitalism. Art critic Richard Bartholomew, who followed Ram Kumar’s career contemporaneously, explained how Kumar’s figuration and colour palette would come together to this effect at this time. “The browns are preponderant, and the exaggeration of the proportions of the human figure in the drawing, with the eyes and the mouth reduced for emphasis, the hands enlarged, speak of human thought untranslated into action. They reveal a painter with a message and a vision.” (“The First National Exhibition of Art”, Richard Bartholomew, The Art Critic, Noida: BART, 2012, p. 282)

Towards the end of the decade, Ram Kumar’s figures slowly receded from his frames, giving way to abstract depictions of landscapes that would come to define his oeuvre. It was only decades later that figurative drawing partially made a return to his practice. In the meanwhile, the poignancy of the figure did not abandon his work along with the human figure itself, but was translated into his landscapes.

FROM THE COLLECTION OF ANDRÉ PADOUX (LOT 9-11)

André Padoux was a French orientalist who began his academic career with the study of Chinese literature. He eventually became one of the world’s foremost authorities on tantrism. Padoux embarked on a study of Sanskrit language and literature under the Indologist Louis Renou. He also studied with Georg Morgenstierne in Norway. He was introduced to tantra philosophy in the late 1950s when, on the urging of renowned Indologist Lilian Silburn, he began studying the corpus of Kashmiri philosopher and mystic Abhinavagupta. In this he was guided by Pandit Lakshman Joo in Srinagar from 1958 to 1959. His thesis “Research on the Symbolism and Energy of Speech in Certain Tantric Texts” was published in 1963. His book, The Hindu Tantric World: An Overview, an authoritative survey of tantric thought and tradition, was published to laudatory reviews.

Padoux began a long career in diplomacy as a part of the French delegation to UNESCO. Over the years, he worked at the French embassies across the world starting with Oslo. He stayed in his role as cultural attaché at the French embassy in New Delhi for six years from 1953 to 1959. Another diplomatic role took him to the French embassy in Hungary from 1969 to 1972. Later, he took on the role of team director for the research project “Hinduism, Texts, Doctrines and Practices” at the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS). He was honorary research director of CNRS from 1982 onwards.

He died in Paris in 2017.

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