All things Art – Ram Kumar

The focus is almost entirely on the figures and the sense of loneliness is overwhelming. In Ram Kumar's works, the figure is not a specific individual; rather, he or she symbolizes the state of the human condition.

All art forms are expressions of an individual’s feelings and experiences of one’s surroundings. The influences of a city or an event or a personality leave lasting impressions on certain individuals. If that individual is a poet, a soul stirring Ghazal is born. If the individual is an author, a Pulitzer winning prose and if that individual is a painter, we get a glimpse of his or her inner self articulated through a composition of colours, strokes and shapes.

When a painting, acquired during US diplomat Kurt London’s visits to India in 1960s, went under the hammer through Christie’s auction in March 2007, it was estimated to fetch $ 400,000 - $ 600,000. It was Ram Kumar’s Vagabond, a 120 cm x 60 cm, oil on Board, painted in 1956. The painting was sold, fetching twice the estimated price, for $ 1,161,000.

Born in Simla in 1924 Ram Kumar did his Masters in Economics from Delhi University. As a student at the Sarada Ukil School of Art, Delhi, he began to participate in group exhibitions when he was spotted by Syed Haider Raza who became a close friend. Ram Kumar left for Paris by boat and studied painting under Andre Lhote and Fernand Leger in Paris between 1949-52.

At 85, Ram Kumar still manages to express his feelings through his paintings. His canvases are a journey through his interpretations of life around him. Here, I have tried to capture his journey through three of his paintings.

Ram Kumar’s paintings can be seen as man’s journey towards an increasing alienated urban life. The human condition in such adverse circumstances is the main concern of the painter as seen in his early paintings, which depict the alienated individual within the city. In Vagabond, although one individual towers over the others, they appear equally forlorn and isolated and are linked to the cityscape and buildings. The strained posture of their bodies is echoed in the angular jagged shapes of the background that communicate a sense of despair and hopelessness. Ram Kumar has divided the canvas into three components, the young man in the foreground who appears to dominate the work, the cityscape comprised of angular buildings and flat planes, and lastly the two companions leaning heavily on each other for support. All three components are linked to each other with a somber palette magnifying the sense of intense desolation. The focus is almost entirely on the figures and the sense of loneliness is overwhelming. In Ram Kumar's works, the figure is not a specific individual; rather, he or she symbolizes the state of the human condition. In Vagabond Ram Kumar is referring to the youth of India, misdirected and disenchanted, trapped in a spiral of a false system of belief.
As a young artist, Ram Kumar was captivated by, or rather obsessed with, the human face because of the ease and intensity with which it registers the drama of life. The sad, desperate, lonely, hopeless or lost faces, which fill the canvases of his early period, render with pathos his view of the human condition.

The mid 1950's heralded the beginning of Ram Kumar's fascination with the cityscapes of Benares; this work is an important example of the series. After studying in Paris under Fernand Leger in 1950, his style as a figurative painter was imbued with a melancholic realism drawing upon the diverse influences of painters like Käthe Schmidt Kollwitz’s empathy for the less fortunate, expressed most famously through the graphic means, and Gustave Courbet, best known as an innovator in Realism (and credited with coining the term). Upon his visit to Benares he abandoned figurative painting in favor of landscapes. Over the last fifty years, Benares has remained an integral part of his oeuvre, and he has depicted the city in a variety of forms. Ram Kumar's first visit to the holy city was in the middle of winter and the crammed alleyways and dilapidated houses gave him the impression of a ghost town.

Ram Kumar’s Banares 2 is a city without hopes; therefore his palette too is fairly muted, and is in keeping with the artist’s deliberately sordid interpretation of the city. Ram Kumar chooses to focus on the urban nightmare that Banares (Varanasi) city has become. So there are no quaint depictions of ghats in his paintings; nor are there the towering spires of the Vishwanath temple. There are illuminated temple doorways hinting at the hallowed Garbha Griha within. The spires of the holy Vishwanath temple and the presence of its neighbor, the Gyan Vapi mosque are only a shadowy presence.

Banares 1 has stillness in common as is evidenced in this particular work. With a cool palette of aquas, blues, grays and tawny browns, the prime motifs within his oeuvre oscillate between his numerous visitations to this holy city and the open vistas that are in essence painterly mementos of his life's journeys. The empty spectral city by the banks of the Ganges has an architectural formalism that ironically in reality would be chaotically teeming with bathers and pilgrims.

He said in one of his interviews, "Wandering along the ghats in a vast sea of humanity, I saw faces like marks of suffering and pain, similar to the blocks, doors and windows jutting out of dilapidated old houses, palaces, temples, the labyrinth 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."