Ram Kumar

New York, Rubin Museum of Art, Modernist Art from India: Approaching Abstraction, May - October 2012

New York, Rubin Museum of Art, Modernist Art from India: Radical Terrain, November 2012- April 2013

B. Citron, Modernist Art from India, Rubin Museum of Art, illustration unpaginated 

There are minor losses along edges and corners, only visible upon very close inspection.
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Over the course of his career, Ram Kumar bore witness to a number of pivotal movements in art history, which were to have a profound effect on his painting. He was born in Simla in 1924 and later moved to New Delhi, where he studied art under the tutelage of Sailoz Mookherjea. In 1950, he left for Paris, where he would continue his studies with the great masters André Lhote and Fernand Léger. Like Francis Newton Souza and Sayed Haider Raza, as a first generation postcolonial Indian artist, Kumar was struck by a desire for global success yet retained his need to preserve a close connection with his homeland. Thus, while European styles infused his work, his subject matter remained distinctly Indian.

A visit to the holy city of Varanasi prompted a significant shift in his painterly style. Seeking to capture the haunted nature of his experience in a novel way, the artist moved away from figuration and started to paint a series of landscapes devoid of the usual constituents of reality and where the human figure was noticeably absent.

This untitled landscape is an example of the artist’s early experimentation on the theme of Varanasi. 'Ram Kumar addressed himself to the formal aberrations of mismatched planes, jamming the horizontal perspective against top views inspired by site-mapping and aerial photography, and locking the muddy, impasto-built riverbank constructions into a Cubist geometrical analysis. Gradually, the architecture drained away from his canvasses: society itself passed from his concerns, until, during the late 1960’s, his paintings assumed the character of abstractionist hymns to nature.' (R. Hoskote, Ram Kumar: Recent Works, SaffronArt & Pundole Art Gallery exhibition catalogue, May - July 2002, p. 6.)