Eight years ago, I had met artist Ram Kumar alone for the first time, in a room in Vadehra Art Gallery. It was the eve of his important retrospective at Lalit Kala Akademi and Vadehra Art Gallery had arranged a one-on-one interview. I got a chance to speak to the artist without being distracted by the hum of voices that marks most art-show openings.
Kumar was sitting quietly, surrounded by a few of his signature works. When I walked in, he offered his hand, saying, “Hello, I am Ram Kumar,” not assuming that I already knew who he was. He was wearing a two-piece grey suit with an immaculate white shirt, which was offset by his large dark-rimmed glasses. It wasn’t cold outside, but Kumar liked to dress formal.
This was the last occasion when I spent quality time Ram Kumar — it indelibly shaped my impression of the late artist. He was like the still waters of the Ganga that he often painted — quiet but deep.
Forms of anguish
Although the retrospective was opening the next day, Kumar was hardly the bundle of nerves that artists, especially the Modernists, who are known for their eccentricity, are wont to turn into at such times (M.F. Husain once wanted to bring a horse for his opening night — but I digress). Kumar was calm and collected when he began to tell me how he fell in love with painting the moment he put brush on canvas.
When he was studying economics at St. Stephen’s College, young Ram Kumar would often visit the art exhibitions in the galleries dotting the Mandi House area during lunch breaks. As these visits became more regular he realised that his thirst was not quenched just by looking at art — he wanted to paint too.
Kumar began by studying art at Sarada Ukil School of Art in New Delhi. One thing led to another and the artist, like all his contemporaries, soon found his way to Paris, where he studied painting under André Lhote and Fernand Léger. It was in Paris that he began to produce his early figurative work that marked his obsession with the human form, especially the face.
The 2010 exhibition featured this early body of work alongside his later abstract landscapes, for which he is better known. I asked him whether he missed painting figures and what had led him towards landscapes and abstracts. “Whether I do figures or landscapes, my passions and concerns remain the same. It is the human condition that leads me to art,” came the stoic reply.
But Kumar’s ideas had changed after he made a trip to Varanasi with Husain. The presence of life and death in close proximity that is the defining feature of Varanasi had made a deep impression on him, as had the vibrant landscape. He painted Varanasi in 1966, and this became the dividing bell between his figurative and abstract art, even though Kumar insisted that they were no different because in both he was conveying the same “metaphysical anguish”.
But Kumar began to use architecture and landscape as metaphors articulating cultural and psychological fragmentation. He translated landscape into a “system of line, planes, blocks; their machine-edged logic entering into dialogue with texture and tone,” as the late art critic, Richard Bartholomew, observed about Kumar’s work.
A man of few words, Kumar made an interesting contrast to his rather garrulous companions, Husain and F.N. Souza, who inducted young Kumar into the extended Progressive Artists’ Group. To be able to hold one’s own before these larger-than-life characters was no small feat. And yet Kumar did stand out with what seemed like a lot of panache; but he had no intention of being different — he was just being himself.
“By the time I met Ram Kumar he’d been to Paris and back. While he was extremely warm he was discriminating about who he was friends with; not rude but reserved. What most didn’t know about him was that he had a saucy wit. As a painter, he believed in immersive experience. Like, when he went to Varanasi with Husain, he stayed on longer than Husain because he had to resolve the multiple emotions that Varanasi evoked — emotions that were polar opposite to his formal discipline as a painter,” says artist Krishen Khanna.
Left aligned
Unlike Husain, Ram Kumar didn’t have affiliations to Bollywood. He wasn’t a ‘lady’s man’ like Souza, whose rambunctious nudes and graffiti got him kicked out of J.J. School of Art. Neither was he spiritual like Raza.
He perhaps had a lot more in common with Parisian artists than with contemporary Indian artists. His early ouevre shows his alignment with the Communist movement. While attending a meeting of the Progressives he came across artist Boris Tazlisky and wrote about this in his journal: “He [Tazlisky] was considered very seriously in Leftist circles. Though he believed in Social Realism he would take liberties with form.”
Ram Kumar’s paintings, such as ‘Sad Town’, where tiny structures huddle together in anguish, look at subaltern life with eyes of empathy. Later, however, Kumar moved towards an abstract understanding of form, where solid shapes dissolved into pure colour and texture.
“With all the transcendental lyricism of his landscapes, Ram Kumar has never been attracted to the unearthly or otherworldly, his feet have always been planted in the terra firma, the palpable reality of the world,” says art connoisseur Arun Vadehra.
His ‘abstractions’ are not flights into the ‘unknown’. Rather, they move like shifting beams of light, passing through the entire space of the painting, from one segment of reality to another, uncovering hidden relations between the sky, the rock, the river.
In a 1996 conversation with Gagan Gill, Ram Kumar said, “How long can one wish to be remembered —100 years, 200 years, 500 years? So your soul may rest in peace? No, I don’t care about all that. I will not like to be remembered for anything… sometimes I feel like obliterating every single trace of my existence. Not my paintings though.”
That pretty much sums up the unassuming man and the brilliant artist that was Ram Kumar.
The writer is a critic-curator by day, and a creative writer and visual artist by night. When in the mood, she likes to serenade life with a guitar and a plate of Khao Suey.
