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Lot 13

 

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The present lot was painted in the 1950s, when Ram Kumar was travelling extensively through Western Europe and exhibiting in cities like Venice, Warsaw and London. The work marks an important inflection point in the artist’s early career during which he began to relinquish figuration for semi-abstract landscapes and cityscapes built out of cubic forms.

Describing this transition, writer Nirmal Verma remarks, “The figure, which played so... The present lot was painted in the 1950s, when Ram Kumar was travelling extensively through Western Europe and exhibiting in cities like Venice, Warsaw and London. The work marks an important inflection point in the artist’s early career during which he began to relinquish figuration for semi-abstract landscapes and cityscapes built out of cubic forms.

Describing this transition, writer Nirmal Verma remarks, “The figure, which played so important a role in the entire drama of Ram’s odyssey, was already beating a retreat, slowly, hesitantly, receding into the margins, almost merging with the dark greys and browns of the horizon. And what till then only vaguely lurked in the background-the shadowy outlines of dilapidated houses, a floating glimpse of the city roofs, the vertical thrust of an electric pole suddenly surged forward, pushing the figures on to the edges, occupying the central stage, as it were.” (Nirmal Verma, “From Solitude to Salvation”, Gagan Gil ed., Ram Kumar: A Journey Within, New Delhi: Vadehra Art Gallery, 1996, p. 23)

Between 1949 and 1952, Kumar trained under eminent French painters André Lhote and Fernand Léger in Paris. During this period, he briefly joined the French Communist Party and interacted with several left-leaning writers and poets, including Louis Aragon, Roger Garaudy, and Paul Eluard. These encounters made him attuned to the social inequality of postwar Europe, which had been devastated economically, and greatly shaped his aesthetic sensibility, especially early in his career. On returning to India, he was just as moved by the despair and desolation he witnessed in the refugees who had fled from Pakistan during the Partition in 1947 and inhabited makeshift colonies near his home in Delhi’s Karol Bagh neighbourhood.

Like his writing, Kumar’s paintings from the 1950s were suffused with a pathos and sensitivity to human suffering. In the present lot, the decay and desolation of urban life that his sombre, elongated figures represented is transferred onto a dark and severe cityscape devoid of human existence. Verma explains, “While not explicitly denying the existence of the ‘self’ he refused to circumscribe it to the anthropological scale of the human body. By releasing it from its human confines, he... acquired a kind of freedom he never had before, freedom to universalize the aggrieved feeling of orphanhood, of loneliness, of alienation as such [...] The writer in him saw to it that if not in the human body, it should find an anchorage, a location in some objective image. Ram Kumar found it in the image of the city-the landscape, a discovery which in its manifold metamorphoses was to have such far-flung consequences in his later evolution. The landscapes that he began to paint were ‘abstract’ only in the sense that they indicated the absence of human figure, at the same time they were concrete and palpable enough to have the ‘city’ as its central motif.” (Verma, p. 24)

The composition possesses a cartographic quality, achieved through the meticulous navigation of line and colour, with fractured geometric forms evoking densely clustered architecture. Kumar’s close friend, art critic Richard Bartholomew, has observed, “Despite the complex themes of the paintings, the Ram Kumar style is simplicity itself. A great theme is nobly handled. A stripped style, paint in the nude. These greys are quiet as nudes are quiet. They are virtuoso greys shot with green and blue and lemon yellow with a base of ochre or red sometimes.” (Richard Bartholomew quoted in “1960s”, Gagan Gill ed., Ram Kumar: A Journey Within, New Delhi: Vadehra Art Gallery, 1996, p. 84)

FORMERLY IN THE COLLECTION OF GEORGE M BUTCHER

The present lot was likely shown at Gallery One in 1958 during the exhibition Seven Indian Painters in Europe, curated by the influential art critic George M Butcher. A regular contributor to The Times and The Guardian in the UK, Butcher played a key role in bringing Indian and Pakistani artists to the attention of European audiences. Among these were Ram Kumar, Akbar Padamsee, F N Souza, and S H Raza, who had travelled to Europe in the early 1950s to study and build their careers. In 1965, he curated Art India Now, a major Commonwealth exhibition. In the following year, he organised a solo show of Ram Kumar’s works at the Upper Grosvenor Galleries in London, where the present lot was exhibited once again. Butcher eventually acquired the painting for his personal collection.

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