Ram Kumar

Acquired directly from the artist circa 1992

This painting is framed behind glass, and is in good condition overall, as viewed. The paper is undulated with minor creasing and there are some, extremely minor accretions scattered across the surface of the artwork.
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Ram Kumar was born in Simla and later moved to New Delhi where he studied art under the tutelage of Sailoz Mookherjea. Like several first generation postcolonial Indian artists, such as Francis Newton Souza and Sayed Haider Raza, he was struck by a desire for global success yet retained his need to belong emphatically to his homeland.  In 1950, he left for Paris where he became part of the communist circle of intelligentsia, regularly attending meetings and demonstrations but later returned to India.

In 1961 Ram Kumar visited the holy city of Varanasi, which resulted in a significant shift in his painterly style.  He sought to capture the haunted nature of his experience in a novel way. Moving away from figuration, he started to paint a series of landscapes devoid of the usual constituents of reality, and where the human figure is noticeably absent. The dramatic intensity of his early figurative paintings is retained in these works, but they attain a kind of austere brilliance, a certain ascetic purity. This new expression of lines and forms and the orchestration of colour began in the 1960's and continued to appear in his paintings for many decades.

Over the years, Ram Kumar has continued to depict this place which had such a profound effect on him and left such an indelible impression on his mind. He returned time and again to the same subject matter as in the case of this work.