Important Notice

The present lot is one of A Ramachandran’s earliest works on canvas and was exhibited at his first one-man show at Kumar Gallery in Delhi in 1966. The conceptual depth of his imagery and technical command that these paintings revealed earned him praise from eminent critics such as Charles Fabri, who had been closely associated with Amrita Sher-Gil, and established him as a significant new voice in Indian art. Unlike his later works, which are a... The present lot is one of A Ramachandran’s earliest works on canvas and was exhibited at his first one-man show at Kumar Gallery in Delhi in 1966. The conceptual depth of his imagery and technical command that these paintings revealed earned him praise from eminent critics such as Charles Fabri, who had been closely associated with Amrita Sher-Gil, and established him as a significant new voice in Indian art. Unlike his later works, which are a vibrant celebration of nature and pastoral life, these paintings present a grim meditation on human suffering.

Ramachandran left his home in Trivandrum, Kerala, after graduating in 1957 and moved to the cultural centre of Santiniketan in West Bengal to gain greater exposure to the arts and further his understanding of Indian modernism. Sketchbooks from this period reveal how he used his time here to develop his own personal style and explore potential themes that would later guide his practice. While Santiniketan broadened his artistic perspective, it was the human tragedy he witnessed on visits to Calcutta, beginning in 1961, that provided him with his incipient themes. The city was still reeling from the devastation of the 1943 Bengal Famine and continued to draw refugees of the Partition of India, many who lived in squalor on pavements and railway platforms as they struggled to rebuild their lives. Recalling its impact, Ramachandran later wrote, “The city with its narrow lanes, broken colonial buildings, stinking sewages, stark poverty and innumerable human beings hovering around like ants has become part of my experience.” (Artist quoted in R Siva Kumar, Ramachandran: A Retrospective - Volume I, New Delhi: Vadehra Art Gallery, 2003, p. 70)

In his monograph on the artist, art historian R Siva Kumar remarks, “He sketched what he saw on the streets of Calcutta, meditated on these motifs etched into his mind, and discovered in them his first images of man. It provided him with a personal matrix for mapping subsequent experiences... However, he did not transcribe them literally, but transformed these vividly experienced facts into haunting images of man.” (Kumar, pp. 70, 78) The resultant paintings are dominated by grotesque, distorted cadaverous figures, squeezed and compressed together in a constricted pictorial space. Titled Kaleidoscope, the present lot is “a collage of three motifs-a severed head, a headless body, and a drape-each separate and with a space of its own but complementary.” (Kumar, p. 70)

Though the extreme foreshortening of the headless figure elicits comparisons with Renaissance painter Mantegna’s portrayal of Christ lying dead on a marble slab in his work Lamentation Over the Dead Christ, as Kumar notes, “this hunk of a corpse is not mourned or kept alive by the warm memories of the faithful… He is a dead weight that belongs to the cold space of the morgue. His nudity, his exposed genitals, tells us how vulnerable he is.” Above it, the disembodied head recalls the anguished faces of Tyeb Mehta’s Falling Figures, caught mid-scream as they plunge to the ground. This influence may stem from the close relationship that Ramachandran shared with Mehta around the time he painted this work. “...Set into a perspective-box over the insensate body,” the head “represents an anguished cry-a primeval, prelinguistic creaturely expression of pain. The box amplifies the cry. While the body recedes from us the cry, by a reversal of perspective, reaches out from the depth of the picture.” Together these figures evoke “not only pain, emptiness and death but also the loss of human wholeness. They invoke man torn into parts, broken down into fragments.” (Kumar, pp. 88-89)

“My first image of man I developed in the streets of Calcutta.” - A RAMACHANDRAN

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