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Artist Profile

KUMAR (R), Ram

(1924)

Photo of artist

"There is
At best, only a limited value
In the knowledge derived from experience,
The knowledge imposes a pattern, and falsifies, For the pattern is in every moment
And everymoment is a new and shocking
Valuation of all we have been"

There is in Padamsee’s late watercolours a sense of melancholy which is faintly reminiscent of Ram Kumar’s urban paintings of the 1950s. Wrought in a naïve style the pathos of those images of ordinary individuals caught in the grind of life was part of the social realist tendency that Kumar was then associated with. His predilection for such subject matter and his membership of the Communist Party led some critics to read these paintings as political statements, but Kumar did not, and still does not, consider himself to have been a political artist. To him his paintings of the 1950s simply represent his personal sense of isolation as a foreigner living in Paris. And consequently when he found that his concerns had moved away from social exile and isolation he developed a more abstracted style better suited to his new subject matter. Crucial to this development was the Benares series of the 1960s. As is well known, Kumar was fascinated by Benares, a city shrouded by death and an attendant spirituality. As the series unfolded, the city was represented as a heaped island of irregular, rectangular patches of paint floating on, and sometimes dissolving into, a monochrome ground. The juxtaposition of these two elements, the formed and the amorphous, served a metaphor for the passage from life to death.

If the Benares series is a meditation on death, then the late landscape paintings concentrate on life. The vibrant colours, strong rhythms and shimmering surfaces convey a sense of restless vitality. In Untitled 2006 everything is in flux. The centrifugal rhythm of the spiral composition whirls the eye around the canvas, never allowing it to linger for more than a moment over any detail before sweeping it along. And round and round it goes, the wondrous cycle of life.


"Indian Art - The Moderns Revisited"
Toby Treves, 2006