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Saffronart | Evening Sale
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On the journey from the figurative to the abstract, Ram
Kumar progressed through several phases during his
career. As an art student in Paris, and in the company of
the capital’s leftist intellectual circles, Kumar’s early paintings
focussed on the lost souls of the modern industrialised city.
However, from playing an important role in the drama of
his paintings in the 1950s, the figure was to be completely
eliminated from his works in the following decade. His use
of imagery underwent a process of gradual clarification and
refinement. In the 1960s, he turned to landscapes, which
were to become bearers of the emotive in his art.
A trip in 1960 to Varanasi, the city of death and rebirth,
supplied Kumar with a new exposure to human suffering
that lay at the intersection of faith and torment. With this
new turn, he sought to liberate reality from its human
context. His early Varanasi works present a somewhat more
realistic depiction of the city and its patchwork of riverbank
buildings. The present lot suggests an aerial view of homes
represented as tightly‒packed squares perched on the banks
of the river. “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
1960s, his paintings assumed the character of abstractionist
hymns to nature.” (Ranjit Hoskote,
Ram Kumar: Recent
Works
, Mumbai: Saffronart and Pundole Art Gallery, May
‒ July 2002, p. 6)
View of Benaras at sunset
PROPERTY FROM A PRIVATE
INTERNATIONAL COLLECTION
64
RAM KUMAR
(b. 1924)
Untitled (Benaras)
Circa 1960s
Oil on board
29.25 x 21.75 in (74.5 x 55 cm)
Rs 1,00,00,000 ‒ 1,50,00,000
$ 151,520 ‒ 227,275
PROVENANCE:
Private Collection, UK
EXHIBITED:
Modernist Art from India: Approaching
Abstraction
, New York: Rubin Museum of Art,
4 May ‒ 16 October 2012
Modernist Art from India: Radical Terrain
, New
York: Rubin Museum of Art, 16 November 2012
‒ 29 April 2013
PUBLISHED:
Shamlal ed.,
Ramkumar
, New Delhi: Lalit Kala
Akademi, 1968, (cover page, illustrated)
Beth Citron,
Modernist Art from India
, New York:
Rubin Museum of Art (illustrated, unpaginated)