Important Notice

“An artist shows the entry point to his creative world and the rest depends on the onlooker, what he sees, feels and interprets. He has to make an effort to find for himself what he is seeking and what the artist wants him to see.” — RAM KUMAR

In 1960, Ram Kumar’s pivotal visit to Banaras sparked a shift towards abstraction that would come to define his artistic oeuvre. Abandoning the human form, he turned his focus to the... “An artist shows the entry point to his creative world and the rest depends on the onlooker, what he sees, feels and interprets. He has to make an effort to find for himself what he is seeking and what the artist wants him to see.” — RAM KUMAR

In 1960, Ram Kumar’s pivotal visit to Banaras sparked a shift towards abstraction that would come to define his artistic oeuvre. Abandoning the human form, he turned his focus to the ‘eternal’ city and its patchwork of architectonic structures. The semi-abstracted landscapes and cityscapes of this period, which is often referred to as his ‘Banaras Years’, became a central metaphor for cultural and psychological fragmentation.

By the late 1960s, the period when the present lot was made, Ram Kumar’s paintings began to also dissolve the built environment. This represented the earliest phase of his deconstructionist approach to abstraction, as he eliminated the human figure and architectural elements from his work. Rather than depicting specific locations like Varanasi, he began to explore landscapes in a more elemental form without identifiable geographical features or location. These later paintings evoke the untamed beauty and quiet solitude of the natural world, drawing inspiration from his memories of the Himalayan foothills and his extensive travels across India. The artist has elaborated on this stylistic transformation saying, “… perhaps a human face or a recognizable image shuts all doors to an observer as far as the basic essence of a work of art is concerned. Only the superficial image remains on the surface which has very little to do with art. As in classical music words are insignificant. In art image is distraction.” (Artist quoted in Gagan Gil ed., “From Ram Kumar’s Notebooks”, Ram Kumar: A Journey Within, Vadehra Art Gallery, New Delhi, 1996, p. 201)

In the present lot, painted in 1969, the artist uses a restrained palette of browns and greys to create a sense of timelessness that absorbs the individual. Contemplating the abstract landscapes that populated his work in the late 1960s, he once said, “I am outside the world that used to be mine. I am experiencing new revelations, losing faith in old patterns which I followed for so many years. Losing is easy but finding a new foothold is difficult. I crave for absolute isolation, far away from these surroundings…Sometimes glimpses of unusual forms, movement of depths, rhythmic lines come to my mind. But they seem only like some fragments-however significant they may appear, they have to be united with something more solid, something difficult to fathom. Some way has to be found out.” (Artist quoted in Gagan Gil ed., p. 204)

Despite the austerity of his works from this period, the abstract visual vocabulary that Kumar devised invites contemplation rather than alienating the viewer. As Sham Lal explains, “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 a gaze. The search for a personal idiom lands many contemporary artists in a private language which bars all strangers entry into their world. Ram Kumar’s work never suffers from a breakdown of communication. Some of his paintings indeed demand a silent communion and, in moments of felicity, we are even able to converse with them.” (Sham Lal, “Between Being and Nothingness”, Gagan Gil ed., p. 15).

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