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Lot Essay
Abandoning his stringent-abstractionist persona, Ram Kumar declares himself an amorist of the landscape. The true object of his art is not to render the landscape, but to love it: the true subject of his art is the landscape as Beloved.
- Ranjit Hoskote
It was with fellow artist Maqbool Fida Husain that Ram Kumar first visited Benares (now Varanasi) in 1960 to sketch his impressions and experiences of the famed holy city on the banks of the River Ganges. In this towering painting from 1968, the artist offers viewers a sectional and almost completely abstract perspective of one of the eternal city’s famous ghats or riverbanks, where pilgrims congregate to celebrate life and death.
“In the work of the 1960s, the close and scrutinising view gave place to a depiction of what Ram felt about Banaras and what he remembered as the essentials of the Eternal city. Banaras was seen distantly and almost indistinctly as a mirage [...] a wedge of intricate structure between expanses of what now appeared to be water and sky. The city appeared to be an emanation. Centuries of pilgrimages and generations of people who sought fulfillment in Banaras, their thoughts, voices, and movement, their total anonymity, the residue of their spirit, their passage through time, made Ram see the image of Banaras as a kind of crystallising memory or as a congregation of echoes. This image of the city formed only a part of the fabric of feelingly rendered pigment, fluid in movement and in suggesting the prospects of water and sky and a prevailing, pervasive mood” (R. Bartholomew, ‘Nature and Abstraction: An Inquiry Into Their Interaction’, Lalit Kala Contemporary 23, New Delhi, 1977-78).
In paintings from this period, Kumar represents his personal experience of the city rather than a literal vision of it. At once joyous and melancholic, fertile and desolate, the emotive landscape of Varanasi profoundly resonated with Kumar. In works like the present lot, “Ram Kumar’s colours range between greys and yellow ochres and browns, but they derive their significance from their tonal subtleties, the tensions they create in passing from one tone to another. His line again is not a boundary, its function is not merely to define form. It pulsates at every point of its length, alive like the colours, alive like the spaces it creates” (J. Swaminathan, ‘Ram Kumar-A New Stage’, Lalit Kala Contemporary 40, New Delhi, 1995, pp. 42-43).
- Ranjit Hoskote
It was with fellow artist Maqbool Fida Husain that Ram Kumar first visited Benares (now Varanasi) in 1960 to sketch his impressions and experiences of the famed holy city on the banks of the River Ganges. In this towering painting from 1968, the artist offers viewers a sectional and almost completely abstract perspective of one of the eternal city’s famous ghats or riverbanks, where pilgrims congregate to celebrate life and death.
“In the work of the 1960s, the close and scrutinising view gave place to a depiction of what Ram felt about Banaras and what he remembered as the essentials of the Eternal city. Banaras was seen distantly and almost indistinctly as a mirage [...] a wedge of intricate structure between expanses of what now appeared to be water and sky. The city appeared to be an emanation. Centuries of pilgrimages and generations of people who sought fulfillment in Banaras, their thoughts, voices, and movement, their total anonymity, the residue of their spirit, their passage through time, made Ram see the image of Banaras as a kind of crystallising memory or as a congregation of echoes. This image of the city formed only a part of the fabric of feelingly rendered pigment, fluid in movement and in suggesting the prospects of water and sky and a prevailing, pervasive mood” (R. Bartholomew, ‘Nature and Abstraction: An Inquiry Into Their Interaction’, Lalit Kala Contemporary 23, New Delhi, 1977-78).
In paintings from this period, Kumar represents his personal experience of the city rather than a literal vision of it. At once joyous and melancholic, fertile and desolate, the emotive landscape of Varanasi profoundly resonated with Kumar. In works like the present lot, “Ram Kumar’s colours range between greys and yellow ochres and browns, but they derive their significance from their tonal subtleties, the tensions they create in passing from one tone to another. His line again is not a boundary, its function is not merely to define form. It pulsates at every point of its length, alive like the colours, alive like the spaces it creates” (J. Swaminathan, ‘Ram Kumar-A New Stage’, Lalit Kala Contemporary 40, New Delhi, 1995, pp. 42-43).