.jpg?w=1)
Lot Essay
The cityscapes of Benares have long been an important theme in Ram Kumar's oeuvre. Visiting the holy city for the first time in the early 1960s with fellow artist Maqbool Fida Husain, Ram Kumar's early depictions of Benares (from 1960-64) are often heavily impasto-ed in a monochromatic palette. As evidenced in this lot, Kumar's bold architectural lines begin to dissolve into areas of white and gray signifying the illusion and emptiness of human existence. As Ram Kumar experimented with this cityscape, the images became more diffuse and refracted, moving closer and closer toward complete abstraction. This early work from 1964 demonstrates this important stylistic turning point, Kumar skillfully depicting the city on the brink of compositional dissolution. Houses and buildings still seem to emerge from the paint but lacking a single brushstroke here or there, would fade into planes of color. Pattern and hue seem to hold as much prominence as line and shape imbuing the work with a quiet tension between the abstract and the figurative.
Though Ram Kumar lives in New Delhi where he also writes fiction, Benares as the Eternal City, has pre-occupied him for over four decades. He describes his first visit in a 1996 interview as follows:
It was the middle of winter. And I had reached the city late at night. The dimly lit lanes were deserted and gave the impression of a ghostly deserted city I thought the city was inhabited only by the dead and their dead souls. It looked like a haunted place and still remains the same. Wandering along the ghats in a vast sea of humanity, I saw faces like masks bearing marks of suffering and pain similar to the blocks, doors and windows jutting out of dilapidated old houses, palaces, temples. Sitting on the steps of Manikarnika Ghat, watching dead bodies some brought from distant villages in boats, waiting for their turn at liberation, I almost felt the disappearing boundary line between life and death. The temples of death, the smoke rising from funeral pyres, the wailing of the relatives of the dead, and the river Ganga flowing slowly without a sound I could not remain a silent observer. And then the mysterious steps on every ghat emerged from the river leading upward to enter the dark labyrinths of the city which was submerged in the stark reality of daily life. Every sight was like a new composition, a still life artistically organized to be interpreted in colours. 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. (Ram Kumar: A Journey Within, New Delhi, 1996, p. 89)
Though Ram Kumar lives in New Delhi where he also writes fiction, Benares as the Eternal City, has pre-occupied him for over four decades. He describes his first visit in a 1996 interview as follows:
It was the middle of winter. And I had reached the city late at night. The dimly lit lanes were deserted and gave the impression of a ghostly deserted city I thought the city was inhabited only by the dead and their dead souls. It looked like a haunted place and still remains the same. Wandering along the ghats in a vast sea of humanity, I saw faces like masks bearing marks of suffering and pain similar to the blocks, doors and windows jutting out of dilapidated old houses, palaces, temples. Sitting on the steps of Manikarnika Ghat, watching dead bodies some brought from distant villages in boats, waiting for their turn at liberation, I almost felt the disappearing boundary line between life and death. The temples of death, the smoke rising from funeral pyres, the wailing of the relatives of the dead, and the river Ganga flowing slowly without a sound I could not remain a silent observer. And then the mysterious steps on every ghat emerged from the river leading upward to enter the dark labyrinths of the city which was submerged in the stark reality of daily life. Every sight was like a new composition, a still life artistically organized to be interpreted in colours. 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. (Ram Kumar: A Journey Within, New Delhi, 1996, p. 89)