RIP Ram Kumar, the angry God of abstract Indian art
MUMBAI: In 1948, Ram Kumar had a difficult decision to make. Should he devote all this time to becoming an artist or pursue it as a hobby while continuing to work in a bank? Kumar, whose younger brother was Nirmal Verma, chose art. It seems like a sentimental decision today but back then, Kumar was being practical. You could sell two paintings, earn ₹300 and back then, that covered his monthly costs in a way that was much more enjoyable than bank work. That year, Kumar would have his first exhibition. Not too many paintings sold, but Kumar had found his calling. It’s an ironic beginning to the career of an artist who wouldn’t make headlines for what his paintings earned, but whose art is a national treasure.
On April 14, the legendary Indian artist Ram Kumar passed away in Delhi. He was 94.
Born in 1924, in Simla, Kumar discovered art while studying economics at St Stephen’s College. His first teacher was the Shantiniketan artist Sailoz Mookherjea and in 1949, Kumar went to Paris to train under Andre Lhote and Fernand Leger. The sights and sounds of post-world War II Europe would impact young Kumar deeply, as would the way French artists and poets grappled with the suffering they witnessed.
Kumar returned to India in 1952 and became friends with SH Raza, MF Husain and others from the Progressive Artists Group. The Progressives are the founding fathers of modern Indian art and in Kumar’s paintings, we see a new artistic language that urges us to look beyond the obvious. After briefly dabbling in figurative painting, Kumar started painting landscapes and cityscapes. These weren’t pretty pictures, but had imagery that reduced a scene to near-abstraction. He dismissed realism and instead recreated the feeling of a place through precariously-balanced shapes, bold lines and earthy colours. Best known for his distinctively abstract art, Kumar would start painting people in his last years. It was almost as though these figures of his imagination were the company he wanted to keep. In 2010, Kumar was awarded the Padma Bhushan by the Indian government.
Kumar is perhaps best known for his paintings of Varanasi and Ladakh. He first went to Varanasi in 1961 with MF Husain and the city fascinated him. He would later say that he turned to an almost-abstract visual language because he just couldn’t imagine being able to recreate the misery and pain radiating from the human form he saw there. Varanasi, crowded with those seeking blessings and salvation, turns into a ghost town in Kumar’s paintings – a cityscape of stark slabs, flares of colours, jagged lines, painfully-pointy roofs and a curving river that’s bent into an embrace.
In the paintings inspired by Ladakh’s harsh but spectacular landscape, Kumar’s talent for using colours almost like emotional accents is unmistakable.
Part memory, part imagination and part abstraction, Kumar’s style was ahead of its time. He didn’t offer the neat prettiness of his friend Raza’s almost mystical abstract art. Kumar’s paintings were often messy, ugly and even hinting violence with the way his lines slashed their way across the canvas. His art demanded you linger and look beyond the obvious. The world in Kumar’s paintings is an organized chaos of shapes, almost as though he’s looking down from above; the ruminations of an angry god.