A show of the selected works of master artist Ram Kumar from 1950 to 2010, at Lalit Kala Akademi, is significant for the study not only of the individual artist, but also contemporary history of art. Through the works on display one got an insight into the creative evolution of the artist from a figurative to an abstract painter, from an ideologically-driven creator to the peaceful meditative sage who seeks to reflect a fraction of the created in his canvases.
His earliest works in the 1950s privilege the world of the dispossessed refugees and labouring masses, the empty frontal gaze interrogating the viewer, demanding intervention and solutions. These works show the artist’s engagement with the lived world around him, confronting and reflecting the humanity in works like the ‘Worker’s Family.’ The dark planes and the reduced urban landscape in the background are in consonance with the contemporary art trends of the 1950s.
Gradually, the figurative disappears from the canvas as the artist started exploring the human element through urban landscape of Banaras. The river, ghats and the lanes that make up the physical and imagined religious landscape of the holy city gets translated into outlines set against swathes of coloured planes. Though empty of human presence they resonate with the collective spiritual experience juxtaposed with dark stark reality of the omnipresent death rituals.
The mood of each painting changes; sometimes it is vibrant, at others somber and almost always sublime.
In the 1980, overt referentiality gives way to abstract structures in ochre, yellows, rusts interspersed with deep ultramarine blue. The application of thick colours with palette knife using bold strokes is mesmerising. The layering of colour speaks of alienation, violence and destruction. Later, landscapes have an aura of calm and mediation. The green of forests and the violets of mountains are mixed with the ambiguity of sienna and umbers. They seek creation and regeneration within the notional real topographies.
The works reverberate with reference to peals of memory and also to a sense of loss of the memories, a fracture and disconnect in an abstract depiction of high aesthetic quality.
— The writer is an art historian, curator and critic