Important Notice

In Ram Kumar's early figurative works, "...one recognized the dramatis personnae as city people in a city environment circumscribed by the constrictions of urban society and motivated by conflicts which ensue from dense population, unemployment, and artificial relationships... the boldly but starkly portrayed people [are] related to one another because of the pervading quality of introspection, of a searching for meaning, purpose, release which... In Ram Kumar's early figurative works, "...one recognized the dramatis personnae as city people in a city environment circumscribed by the constrictions of urban society and motivated by conflicts which ensue from dense population, unemployment, and artificial relationships... the boldly but starkly portrayed people [are] related to one another because of the pervading quality of introspection, of a searching for meaning, purpose, release which is written large on their countenances" (Richard Bartholomew, "Attitudes to the Social Condition: Notes on Ram Kumar, Satish Gujral, Krishen Khanna and Ramachandran", Lalit Kala Contemporary 24-25, Lalit Kala Akademi, New Delhi, 1977-78, p. 31).

Although the subject of the present lot is probably modeled on the artist's own figure, it is not representative of a specific person. Rather, like his other figurative paintings and drawings from the period, it is symbolic of the general malaise and ennui that Kumar believed had overtaken urban India at the time. As a student in Paris in the early 1950s, the artist joined the French Communist Party and worked on "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. He wished to design an idiom that would portray, at a pitch of stylized intensity, the misery of the common people under the bourgeois-capitalist order" ("The Poet of the Visionary Landscape", Ram Kumar - A Journey Within, Vadehra Art Gallery, New Delhi, 1996, p. 37).

"To this period belong those lost souls…these fugitives - white-collar and blue-collar, awkward in the ill- fitting costume of urbanity - are trapped in a hostile environment, and in their own divided selves. Reduced to pawns and tramps, components in the brutal machine of a society controlled by unseen powers…his protagonists can do little but squint out at exits that are not there" (Ibid.).

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