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Lot 45

 

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“It was not merely outward appearances which were fascinating but they were vibrant with an 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 depths of an experience.”
- RAM KUMAR

Through the 1950s, Ram Kumar painted human subjects to convey his own views on the pathos and anguish of the human condition. But by... “It was not merely outward appearances which were fascinating but they were vibrant with an 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 depths of an experience.”
- RAM KUMAR

Through the 1950s, Ram Kumar painted human subjects to convey his own views on the pathos and anguish of the human condition. But by the end of the decade, the figure began to recede from his works and he turned to abstraction to depict cityscapes and landscapes. The artist’s journey to Benaras with contemporary and friend M F Husain in 1960 was a crucial catalyst in this transition. Remarks writer and critic Ranjit Hoskote, “By banishing the figure from his kingdom of shadows, Ram Kumar was able to emphasize the nullification of humanity, and to deploy architecture and landscape as metaphors articulating cultural and psychological fragmentation, the bondage of an imposed destiny that strangled the will to liberation and self-knowledge.” (Ranjit Hoskote, “The Poet of the Visionary Landscape,” Ram Kumar: A Journey Within, Gagan Gill ed., New Delhi: Vadehra Art Gallery, 1996, p. 37)

The two artists stayed at the home of writer Munshi Premchand’s son Shripat Rai, and would explore the city and its ghats independently, reconvening at the end of the day to share their experiences with each other. While it was an inspiring trip for both, Benaras left a lasting impression on Kumar and became a central subject of his works in the following decades. He was moved by the sights of the buzzing city where life and death co-existed in close proximity- Manikarnika Ghat where crowds thronged to cremate their dead, boats anchored at the ghats, and the narrow maze of streets with temples and dilapidated old homes haphazardly stacked together fascinated him.

The artist once remarked, “Benares is important for me both as an artist and as a human being, the first paintings came at a point when I wanted to develop elements in figurative painting and go beyond it, my first visit to the city invoked an emotional reaction as it had peculiar associations. But such romantic ideas were dispelled when I came face to face with reality. There was so much pain and sorrow of humanity. As an artist it became a challenge to portray this agony and suffering, its intensity required the use of symbolic motifs, so my Benares is of a representative sort.” (Seema Bawa, “Ram Kumar: Artistic Intensity of an Ascetic,” artnewsnviews.com, online)

Kumar chose an emotive rather than literal representation of Benaras and imagined the city in his paintings not as teeming with activity, but as melancholic, desolate and devoid of human figures. “What he was interested in depicting was not the jostling crowds at the ghats; not the hubbub of rites; not the hope, or frenzy, or anticipated bliss of the people; but the silent waiting that underlay it all.” (Geeta Kapur, “Ram Kumar: City-Exile,” Contemporary Indian Artists, New Delhi: Vikas Publishing House Pvt. Ltd, 1978, p. 75)

The present lot suggests an aerial view of a cluster of small buildings rendered, in thick impasto, as jumbled and tightly-packed squares perched on the banks of the Ganga, perhaps recalling the artist’s first impression of Benares, as a “ghostly deserted city” when he arrived late on a cold winter night. The muted colour palette of browns, greys, and greens is reminiscent of the muddy colours of the river and typical of this period in his oeuvre. Notes writer and art critic Ranjit Hoskote, Ram Kumar “addressed himself to the formal aberrations of mismatched planes, jamming the horizontal perspective against top views inspired by site-mapping and aerial photography, and locking the muddy, impasto-built riverbank constructions into a Cubist geometrical analysis. Gradually, the architecture drained away from his canvases: society itself passed from his concerns, until, during the late 1960s, his paintings assumed the character of abstractionist hymns to nature.” (Hoskote, pp. 37-38)

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