.jpg?w=1)
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
“Ram Kumar has no desire to shock or seduce the eye which makes so much of abstract art slide into the sensational or the decorative. The ascetic streak in his mental make-up will not permit any such indulgence. The sense of quiet that pervades his work invites contemplation, not gaze” (S. Lal, ‘Between Being and Nothingness’, Ram Kumar: A Journey Within, Vadehra Art Gallery, New Delhi, 1996, p. 15).
Ram Kumar first visited Benares (now Varanasi) with his fellow artist Maqbool Fida Husain in 1960. What he experienced there at the banks of the Ganges, the juxtaposed presence of joy and melancholia, fertility and desolation, and life and death, profoundly shaped the abstract form that his art would now take, expressing his personal experiences of the holy city. As the critic Richard Bartholomew noted, “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 Untitled (In Memoriam), painted in 1965, Ram Kumar recreates this floating landscape as an amalgamated space filled with memories of devotion and of life and death. Here, it appears as if Kumar condenses the city into a singular architectural structure holding fragments of time sewn together in shades of sandstone, limestone and marble. The darker central structure possibly represents a cross-section of a house or is perhaps an aerial view of the archetypal constriction of the city’s narrow lanes and packed neighbourhoods. Despite the cacophony of the city teeming with people and movement, however, quietude prevails in this representation of it, percolating through the canvas into the world of the viewer.
- Ranjit Hoskote
“Ram Kumar has no desire to shock or seduce the eye which makes so much of abstract art slide into the sensational or the decorative. The ascetic streak in his mental make-up will not permit any such indulgence. The sense of quiet that pervades his work invites contemplation, not gaze” (S. Lal, ‘Between Being and Nothingness’, Ram Kumar: A Journey Within, Vadehra Art Gallery, New Delhi, 1996, p. 15).
Ram Kumar first visited Benares (now Varanasi) with his fellow artist Maqbool Fida Husain in 1960. What he experienced there at the banks of the Ganges, the juxtaposed presence of joy and melancholia, fertility and desolation, and life and death, profoundly shaped the abstract form that his art would now take, expressing his personal experiences of the holy city. As the critic Richard Bartholomew noted, “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 Untitled (In Memoriam), painted in 1965, Ram Kumar recreates this floating landscape as an amalgamated space filled with memories of devotion and of life and death. Here, it appears as if Kumar condenses the city into a singular architectural structure holding fragments of time sewn together in shades of sandstone, limestone and marble. The darker central structure possibly represents a cross-section of a house or is perhaps an aerial view of the archetypal constriction of the city’s narrow lanes and packed neighbourhoods. Despite the cacophony of the city teeming with people and movement, however, quietude prevails in this representation of it, percolating through the canvas into the world of the viewer.