126-127 / 184
126
127
"There is an enigmatic mystery about the inner life of a
colour applied on canvas"
RAM KUMAR
PROPERTY FROM THE DIRK AND HIXE ANGELROTH
COLLECTION, AUSTRIA
60
RAM KUMAR
(b. 1924)
Untitled
Signed and dated 'Ram Kumar 76' (on the reverse)
1976
Oil on canvas
50 x 32.5 in (127 x 82.6 cm)
Rs 60,00,000 ‒ 80,00,000
$ 95,240 ‒ 126,985
PROVENANCE
Acquired from Pundole Art Gallery, Mumbai, 1976
Ram Kumar has honed his visual repertoire and painted
landscapes which evoke the intangible, over a remarkable
career spanning seven decades. His austere colour palette
and careful brushstrokes reveal an ability to beckon moods
through abstract representation, as seen in the present lot.
Limiting his palette to shades of tans, ochre, red, and blue,
he treats the abstracted landscape with elegiac restraint.
“The variegated colours of these irregular planes are
suggestive of tracts of sea and sand, of rocky mountains and
flat fields, of barren, parched earth and fecund vegetation.
It is left to colour and textures to transmit the moods and
sensations that the various topographical elements convey.
Perhaps they even represent the more unseen but perceived
elements in the phenomenal world—the warm sunshine, a
cooling breeze, the dampness of mists or hot, gusty winds.
Ochres, rusts, yellows, greens, mauves and ultramarine
blues are orchestrated together to produce complex
colour symphonies, which induce alternate feelings of both
movement and stillness.” (Meera Menezes,
Ram Kumar:
Traversing the Landscapes of the Mind
, Mumbai: Saffronart,
2017, p. 13)
Writing for
Lalit Kala Contemporary
in 1975‒76, the same
period when the present lot was painted, art critic Richard
Bartholomew eloquently summed up the evolution in
Kumar’s vision: “...there is a spatial quality in the recent
painting (1970 onwards), a sense of flight, of movement,
and there is an aerial perspective (sometimes a series of
perspectives), and it seems that the painter is looking at
landscape in a number of ways and from different angles
and points of view... Everything from the past is there... It
has been a long journey through nature and life to be able
to see things in this way and from this perspective.” (quoted
in Rati Bartholomew, Pablo Bartholomew, Carmen Kagal and
Rosalyn D’Mello eds.,
Richard Bartholomew: The Art Critic
,
New Delhi: BART, 2012, pp. 539‒540, 544)
In the decades that followed, Kumar phased out any vestige
of the figurative, using colour and planes that had no obvious
basis in either architecture or the physical landscape. The
present lot is part of an important phase when Kumar
straddled the worlds of the outer, physical and inner
landscapes of memory and mood.