Important Notice

The present lot, painted in 1962, marks a pivotal moment in Ram Kumar’s artistic journey. By this time, he had moved away from the sombre, melancholic figures of the previous decade and turned to abstraction to portray cityscapes and landscapes-a shift that would come to define his career. Remarks critic Richard Bartholomew, “In the years between 1960-64 Ram used for his imagery architecture, houses, lanes, shadows, reflections-in short... The present lot, painted in 1962, marks a pivotal moment in Ram Kumar’s artistic journey. By this time, he had moved away from the sombre, melancholic figures of the previous decade and turned to abstraction to portray cityscapes and landscapes-a shift that would come to define his career. Remarks critic Richard Bartholomew, “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...” (Richard Bartholomew, “The Abstract as a Pictorial Proposition”, Gagan Gill ed., Ram Kumar: A Journey Within, New Delhi: Vadehra Art Gallery, 1996, pp. 29-30)

A key impetus for this transition was the artist’s 1960 visit to Banaras, along with his friend and contemporary M F Husain, which profoundly influenced his approach to art. Kumar would spend his days wandering around the ghats and was moved by just how closely life and death appeared to co-exist in the sacred city. The many sights he witnessed-Manikarnika Ghat where wailing crowds thronged to cremate their dead, boats anchored at the ghats, and the narrow warren of streets with temples and dilapidated old homes haphazardly stacked together-left a lasting impression on his artistic sensibility.

Ram Kumar’s depictions were not literal renderings of his surroundings but deeply emotive interpretations that balanced the forms of the landscape with increasingly abstract representations of built forms and water. In contrast to the teeming city, his interpretation of Banaras is stark, desolate, and stripped of human presence. Writer and critic Ranjit Hoskote observes that in works such as the present lot, the artist “translates the landscape into a system of lines, planes, blocks; their machine-edged logic, entering into dialogue with texture and tone, govern the distribution of significant masses over the picture space... He does not mirror reality, but subjects it to a prismatic analysis: his topography, for instance, is a diagram of forces in a field rather than a picturesque postcard view; each city, each trapfall is a summation of views from various angles, arranged on the same plane for the discernment of the viewer.” (Ranjit Hoskote, “The Poet of the Visionary Landscape”, Gagan Gill ed., Ram Kumar: A Journey Within, Vadehra Art Gallery, New Delhi, 1996, p. 38)

The present work exemplifies the austere phase of the early 1960s, characterised by Kumar’s use of thick impasto and a predominantly monochromatic palette that give his works a sense of quiet introspection. Noted Bartholomew, “Colour and the complexity of imagery determined the mood of the painting... 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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