Ram Kumar (1924 – 2018)

“Any great work of art… revives and readapts time and space, and the measure of its success is the extent to which it makes you an inhabitant of that world – the extent to which it invites you in and lets you breathe its strange, special air.” – Leonard Bernstein


And such has been the effect Ram Kumar’s art has had on us, since decades over. Artist Ram Kumar, one of India’s veteran modernist masters passed away on the morning of 14th April 2018, Saturday. A phenomenon though deemed inevitable among mortals, has evoked grief among the entire Indian art circuit, nonetheless.

In his long and dynamic life, Ram Kumar was one of India’s most respected and renowned artists. A man known best for his abstract landscape paintings, and some very suggestive works inspired by the city of Varanasi, Ram Kumar comprised the first generation of post-colonial artists who were looking for a new language that was simultaneously global and Indian, along with the likes of MF Husain, Tyeb Mehta, Krishen Khanna and FN Souza. Kumar was born in Shimla’s idyll, where one may think he must have received his mystical initiation of aesthetics, in the glorious lap of nature. However, his formal education in art happened at the Sarada Ukil School of Art in New Delhi. He was also an Economics major from the St. Stephen’s College, after which he went on to Paris in the fifties to study art at the ateliers of Andre Lhote and Fernand Leger.

In 1957, artist Vasudeo S. Gaitonde and Ram Kumar collaborated with MF Husain and Tyeb Mehta to establish an artists’ collective. A cluster they named Shilalekh. This group went on to produce a series of lithographs so that their work could reach a wider audience. The late Nirmal Verma, Ram Kumar’s writer and brother, once famously quoted:

“History and memory become inseparable. There is something so ‘delicately disturbing’ in these paintings…” perhaps because “…they evoke what we remember, creating equivalence between memory and image.”

Kumar was awarded the Padma Shri in 1972 and the Padma Bhushan in 2010.

In his passing away on Saturday, India has lost one of the best names in the Neoteric congregate of modern art.