Adieu to an artist possessed

Recognition for Ram Kumar came in his last decades when his market escalated, but not to extraordinary peaks like for V S Gaitonde

Artist Ram Kumar, who passed away on April 14, is being memorialised by way of obituaries and services and, as one might expect of such occasions, these are mostly paeans about his reticence in the face of his popularity, and his ability to invent a unique body of work despite the odds. There is no doubt that Ram Kumar rose to heights his unschooled art could only have aspired to at the start of his career, and was increasingly well received by critics as well as collectors, but how will posterity regard his contribution to Indian modernism?

I think the greatest factor that helped shape his vision was what some might consider a disadvantage: his lack of formal training in art. Art schools in India, and this was probably even more true at the time, operate within a rigid curriculum based on Western precepts of painting, making little allowance for experimentation, or freedom from inflexible, grammarian disciplines. Not that Ram Kumar was unaware of the advantages of appropriate schooling — he was, after all, a student of the prestigious St Stephen’s College in Delhi University, if only of economics — and showed sufficient chutzpah to travel to Paris to train under Andre Lhote and Fernand Léger.

Several Indian artists at the time appeared Europe-bound, seizing the moment to study the masters and their idols, seeking inspiration from them. They were seduced by the bright lights and society of Paris and London. Ram Kumar, unexpectedly, saw only the bleak remnants of bombed-out, post-war cities and the misery of the displaced and dispossessed in a post-industrial world. No wonder his work at the time, reminiscent of Amedeo Modigliani’s elongated figures, is steeped in melancholy, yet not entirely devoid of romanticism. Perhaps it is nostalgia that makes collectors respond to these paintings with the full draw of their purse strings.

On his return to India, Ram Kumar joined the practising modernists but preferred to remain on the sidelines. Those early years must have been a struggle because he did not take any of the popular positions around art — progressive, anti-establishment, a mirror to social ills — content to observe the battlelines from the ranks even as he struggled to shed the figurative in favour of the abstract. The demons he encountered were of his own making; abstract art, though intellectually stimulating, had a poor market — and one must, after all, put bread and butter on the family table.

An untitled painting by Ram Kumar: (23 September 1924 — 14 April 2018)

Did Ram Kumar get his due? I would argue otherwise. Ever since his first encounter with Banaras (now Varanasi) that shaped his distinctive style, he was like an artist possessed. To view the early, hesitant collapse of lines and forms from the 1960s to the power and strength of the swooping diagonals and slashes of colour in the ‘70s is to experience something close to divinity.

Recognition for Ram Kumar came in the last decades when his market escalated, but not to the extraordinary peaks that other abstractionists like V S Gaitonde — who lived in such penury, Ram Kumar sent him a daily tiffin — have experienced. The post-liberalisation art market saw a surge in demand for his work, and Ram Kumar acquiesced. That profusion did his image more harm than good. Collectors demanded quality works but recent paintings were inconsistent. At the India Art Fair, it was not unusual to see several booths simultaneously offering these works, as if the only thing that mattered to galleries was to cash in on his fame. His legacy, therefore, will veer between the two extremes most artists must grapple with — works of exceptional quality versus those that are commercial. The visibility of the latter in Ram Kumar’s case is the challenge his admirers and collectors must now deal with.
 

Kishore Singh is a Delhi-based writer and art critic. These views are personal and do not reflect those of the organisation with which he is associated