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Lot 7

 

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During the mid and late 1950s Ram Kumar painted a series of austere urban landscapes, several populated by a caste of dejected men and women, as part of his commentary on the desolation and despair felt by so many in the cities and towns of post-Independence India. Mirroring the outlook of the short stories he penned a few years earlier including his first, titled Ghar Bane Ghar Toote, “The paintings of this period should be read as ironic... During the mid and late 1950s Ram Kumar painted a series of austere urban landscapes, several populated by a caste of dejected men and women, as part of his commentary on the desolation and despair felt by so many in the cities and towns of post-Independence India. Mirroring the outlook of the short stories he penned a few years earlier including his first, titled Ghar Bane Ghar Toote, “The paintings of this period should be read as ironic parables of the defeat, humiliation and ruin that became the fate of millions of people soon after Independence” (Alok Bhalla, “Introduction”, The Sea and Other Stories by Ram Kumar, Indian Institute of Advanced Studies, Shimla, 1997, p. xv).

The present lot, painted in the late 1950s when Ram Kumar was travelling extensively through Western Europe and exhibiting in cities like Venice, Warsaw and London, offers viewers a dark and severe cityscape, but is curiously devoid of human presence. Marking a transition in the artist’s oeuvre between his early figuration and the abstract landscapes he began to paint in the 1960s, this canvas, like his writing, offers a clear idea of Kumar’s aesthetic sensibility. As Alok Bhalla notes, in both genres his work is ascetic, “…If there are no extravagant lines in his drawings, there are no melodramatic gestures in his stories. The melancholic stillness that settles over his city landscape is analogous to the arid silence that separates the characters he creates. The severe beauty of colours in his sketchbooks finds its equivalent in the sad cadence of sentence in his writing. His landscapes are remote, alien, threatening; his stories are sad, troubled and brooding” (Ibid., p. ix).

This particular landscape was probably exhibited at Gallery One in 1958 as part of the show, ‘Seven Indian Painters in Europe’, curated by George M. Butcher. Butcher was an eminent art critic who wrote frequently for the Times and the Guardian in the United Kingdom, and was instrumental in introducing several Indian and Pakistani artists to a wider audience in Europe including, amongst others, Ram Kumar, Akbar Padamsee, F.N. Souza and S.H. Raza who had all travelled there to study and establish their reputations in the early 1950s. Butcher went on to curate ‘Art India Now’, the Commonwealth exhibition, in 1965, and in 1966, he organised another exhibition of works by Ram Kumar in London at the Upper Grosvenor Galleries, where the present lot, a painting Butcher eventually acquired for his personal collection, was exhibited again.

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