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“Every sight was like a new composition, a still life artistically organised 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. I could feel a new visual language emerging from the depths of an experience.” — RAM KUMAR

A trip to Banaras in 1960 marked... “Every sight was like a new composition, a still life artistically organised 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. I could feel a new visual language emerging from the depths of an experience.” — RAM KUMAR

A trip to Banaras in 1960 marked a decisive turning point in Ram Kumar’s artistic journey. He began moving away from figuration and embraced semi- abstracted landscapes and cityscapes, which would become synonymous with his oeuvre. Rather than a realistic depiction, he distilled the essence of a place without overt symbolism. Instead, he roused emotion through a strategic and nuanced use of colour. Speaking about his palette, Kumar once explained, “There is an enigmatic mystery about the inner life of a colour applied on canvas. It stands out by itself in the beginning but slowly it starts building up relationships with other areas, other colours, and forms. This continues. There is a pause, a silence, an accident and in the end some sort of harmony.” (Artist quoted in Sham Lal, Nirmal Verma et al, “From Ram Kumar’s Notebooks”, Gagan Gill ed., Ram Kumar: A Journey Within, New Delhi: Vadehra Art Gallery, 1996, p. 202)

Kumar travelled to the city with his close friend M F Husain, staying at the home of Shripat Rai, son of writer Munshi Premchand. The two explored independently by day, meeting each evening to exchange impressions. Of his wanderings along the ghats, Kumar later recalled, “... 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, the labyrinths of lanes and bylanes of the old city, hundreds of boats-I almost saw a new world, very strange, yet very familiar, very much my own.” (Artist quoted in Gil ed., “The Banaras Years”, p. 89)

He returned to Banaras repeatedly, both in person and through his paintings. In the 1960s, his views of the city became increasingly abstract. Stripped of human activity, they were rendered instead as stark, melancholic visions in a restrained palette of greys and whites, heightening their sense of solitude and desolation. However, the present lot, painted in 2006, offers a strikingly different mood. After nearly three decades of planar abstraction, architectural forms and recognisable landscape elements such as trees began to re-emerge in his work, accompanied by a lighter palette. Writer and curator Meera Menezes notes, “Varanasi reappears but it is [...] not the grey, much? encrusted town, which spoke of the anguish of the people crowding its streets or of an ancient civilization with its dilapidated homes sinking into the mud. Instead, the bright skies and waters of the Ganga reclaim the space, as they do their blueness, after being relegated to the outer recesses or edged out of the frame in Kumar’s early works [...] the feeling of gloom and doom no longer haunts these paintings. A brightening of the palette with the use of lighter shades of browns and greys on the houses once again amply demonstrates the power of colour in projecting mood and sentiment.” (Meera Menezes, “Traversing the Landscapes of the Mind”, Ram Kumar: Traversing the Landscapes of the Mind, Mumbai: Saffronart, 2016, p. 13)

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