Important Notice

Ram Kumar’s paintings from the mid 1960s to the early 1970s document a gradual movement away from figuration and recognizable, inhabited landscapes towards the complete abstraction of land, sea and sky on his painted surfaces.

“It is easy to see that Ram Kumar’s variations on the Benares theme would lead to abstraction. During the long phase of the Benares cityscapes there were paintings that one could regard, for all practical... Ram Kumar’s paintings from the mid 1960s to the early 1970s document a gradual movement away from figuration and recognizable, inhabited landscapes towards the complete abstraction of land, sea and sky on his painted surfaces.

“It is easy to see that Ram Kumar’s variations on the Benares theme would lead to abstraction. During the long phase of the Benares cityscapes there were paintings that one could regard, for all practical purposes, abstract; just as paintings after 1965, though largely abstract, contained shapes and references to the former theme – a suggestion of a door, a bridge, or a wall surface. The movement towards abstraction, inevitable as it might have been, also meant that the preoccupation with form would take precedence over everything else; certainly over content, but also over the sense of pathos that distinguished Ram Kumar’s work” (Geeta Kapur, Contemporary Indian Artists, Vikas Publishing House Pvt. Ltd., New Delhi, 1978, p. 82).

The present lot, a transitional canvas from this period, illustrates what Alok Bhalla termed the artist’s intermediate ‘citylandscapes’ – neither the compact townscapes he painted after his first visit to Varanasi in 1961, nor his barren, planar landscapes of the following years. “In the 1960’s and 70’s there is a radical change in Ram Kumar’s work. The paintings continue to be austere and anguished, but they cease to include human figures. It is as if he decides to give up on man and his social fate, and tries to find his own solitary path towards vision. The quest is hard and long. In the citylandscapes he paints over these two decades, empty houses, which seem to collide with each other, are scratched out of black restless lines on brown grey backgrounds. There is no sky to lighten the melancholy and no trees to break the monotony of stone and earth. Even Varanasi which he paints obsessively, is not the city of pilgrims, priests, temples and lights, but a city which is slowly sinking into primeaval mud” (“Introduction”, The Sea and Other Stories by Ram Kumar, Indian Institute of Advanced Studies, Shimla, 1997, p. xv).

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