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