The art of stillness

“The artist today is often tempted to add to the noise of the time by proclaiming all too loudly his presence in his work. Ram Kumar, on the other hand, hides himself in his paintings. It is a presence so shy and unobtrusive as to come very near to an absence...”

— Sham Lal in his essay ‘Between Being and

Nothingness’ in ‘Ram Kumar: A Journey Within’

(Vadehra Art Gallery, 1996)

AN all-pervading quietude was the hallmark of artist Ram Kumar’s work. Whether he was painting the turmoil at the refugee camps in Delhi post-Partition or the bustling Banaras (now Varanasi), the silence never left his works. Six years after his death, on his birth centenary tomorrow, that silence still seems unsettling.

Born at Kaithu in Shimla on September 23, 1924, Ram Kumar came to Delhi to pursue MA in economics at St Stephen’s College. He harboured the desire to be a writer. But one day, in 1943, while “loitering around Connaught Place”, he happened to see a board of Sarada Ukil School of Art, which was run by an eminent artist of the time, Sailoz Mukerjea. On a whim, he joined the evening classes. After finishing his degree, he returned to Shimla to join his uncle’s bank, but the drab ledgers were not to hold his attention for long. An international exhibition held at Delhi in 1946 was to be the turning point. He hadn’t seen anything of that sort; he found himself returning to it again and again. Around this time, he was both writing and painting, holding exhibitions, solo and as part of Silpi Chakra Group, an organisation formed to support artists in the aftermath of Partition. His first solo show was held at the YMCA in Shimla in 1949 where the only art work sold was bought by Dr Zakir Husain, his teacher at St Stephen’s and the future President of India.

One of his early friends in the art circle was SH Raza. The two travelled to Bombay where, to quote art critic Geeta Kapur from her seminal work ‘Contemporary Artists of India’: “…Raza’s virtual guru, (Walter) Langhammer, a commercial artist who lorded it over the Bombay scene, told Ram Kumar to pack up as an artist, as he had no natural talents and acquired skills for the job.”

But Ram Kumar had already decided his calling. With Rs 1,000 borrowed from his father for the travel and Rs 500 scholarship from the French government, he went to Paris in 1949 to study art. He apprenticed under Andre Lhote and Fernand Leger, two of the biggest names in art then. Those were heady days in Europe. Existentialist fervour had gripped Paris. Kumar could not have remained untouched. He encountered poets like Louis Aragon and Paul Eluard, sending their poetry books back home to younger brother Nirmal Verma, the writer. But unlike his contemporaries Raza, FN Souza and Akbar Padamsee, he didn’t settle in Europe, notes Kapur. He returned to India in 1951, and began exhibiting through Alliance Francaise his figurative works that drew on post-Cubism.

Ram Kumar’s turn towards abstractionism was accidental. The year was 1961. He went to Banaras with MF Husain. There, every morning, the two would go into opposite directions and come back in the evening and compare notes. It is here that the human figure began retreating from his paintings, “almost merging with the dark greys and browns of the horizons. And what till then only vaguely lurked in the background — the shadowy outlines of dilapidated houses, a floating glimpse of the city roofs, the vertical thrust of an electric pole suddenly surged forward”, as Nirmal Verma writes in his essay in ‘Ram Kumar — A Journey Within’. The city exposed Kumar “to a wholly new kind of human suffering that lay at the intersection of faith and torment” (Saffronart.com).

In his own words: “I thought I could not paint human being… the suffering of the human being was so acute… That is when I became a little bit abstract and tried to show that agony through abstract forms. It was almost too strong, too overpowering.”

Art critic Richard Bartholomew had realised the man’s quiet genius early on. “Ram Kumar thus remains the leading figure in this style, unmatched too. Among Indian painters, Ram Kumar is perhaps the only one who has no imitators and no followers, for both his themes and his method are simple. They are so simple and sincere that imitation is practically impossible,” he had written in Hindustan Times Weekly (October 23, 1955). Bartholomew was to become a lifelong friend of Ram Kumar and a valued critic.

His palette was dark, dominated by greys and browns; “burnt umber touched with grey, grey-green, green-blue, and olive, with sometimes a base of red, usually of ochre...” Kapur lists. The melancholy pervaded his canvas, even when the colours were red. “Laal rang bhi udaas ho sakta hai,” he had told art critic Prayag Shukla once, but wished, while talking to an interviewer, that the colours in his paintings were “more vibrant, more eloquent”.

Shukla, who knew Ram Kumar for more than five decades, says travel played a huge role in his journey as a painter. “Banaras, Greece, Ladakh, New Zealand, Australia... Whenever he returned, he would come and show his paintings from the travels at Vadehra Art Gallery and I would always tell him, ‘Your colours have changed so much.’ For instance, when he returned from New Zealand, his works turned blue. He told me that the sky there, its lakes and the sea had changed him a lot. In 2007, he took his 12-year-old grandson, Avimukt Verma, to all the places he frequented in Paris and all the cafes he avoided because the smell made him desire for coffee and he didn’t have the money to buy,” Shukla shares.

The two first met in Kolkata in the early 1960s. Kumar was travelling with his artworks, but for Shukla, he was more famous as an author. Sometime later, when they met again in Delhi in 1964, Shukla was 24 and still a newcomer in the field of writing. “Ram Kumarji allowed me to stay at his Gole Market studio for several months. And it is due to him that I turned an art critic,” he gushes.

Aakriti Art Gallery, Kolkata, hosted several exhibitions featuring Ram Kumar’s works, including ‘Ram Kumar Lines and Colours’ in 2016 and ‘Drawings from the ’60s’ in 2014 and 2015. Vikram Bachhawat, director of the gallery, says Kumar’s distinction in his early career stemmed from his ability to bridge Indian sensibilities with modernist techniques. “His works are marked by their fluid, dream-like landscapes, organic forms and an evocative use of colour that is different from the rigid structures of geometric abstraction. What set him apart was his ability to convey the presence of essence rather than mere absence of form, capturing fleeting moments, the transient beauty of nature, and the subtleties of the human soul. His connection with the Progressive Artists’ Group and his philosophical exploration through art made him a star in the Indian modernist movement,” he shares. While Kumar showcased his works with PAG, he never formally joined it.

Delhi-based critic and curator Georgina Maddox recalls Kumar as “a man of few words”, someone who spent more time showing his work and allowing his canvases to do the speaking. “Ram Kumar was a rather quiet personality and not as outgoing as the other Progressive artists — whether it was Souza who was very verbal, Raza who was no doubt living in Paris but approachable and very articulate when he chose to speak, Husain who was a larger-than-life popular character or, for that matter, Ara, who was also outgoing. Gade was also reserved and we have not heard much of him or seen his work either.” She feels that Ram Kumar is yet to be recognised for his true potential and it was his reserved nature that led to lesser number of people knowing about him or his work.

Nonetheless, Ram Kumar’s works keep featuring in exhibitions, including ‘India’s Rockefeller Artists: An Indo-US Cultural Saga’, on view at DAG in New Delhi till October 12. These also mark their presence at art auctions. Last week, Christie’s set a new record for a work on paper by the artist, with a sketchbook from his days as a student in the Paris atelier of Leger. It sold for $201,600 (approximately Rs 1.68 crore). In the coming week, AstaGuru’s Manifest auction will feature works highlighting both his figurative and abstract phases. “It will celebrate his mastery across various mediums, including works on canvas and paper as well as a sculpture, illustrating his ability to convey profound emotional and philosophical depth through colour, form and texture,” says Sneha Gautam, senior vice president, client relations, AstaGuru Auction House. A work by Kumar was also sold for Rs 2.28 crore at their Modern Odyssey auction in December 2023.

So far, the highest price for the artist — Rs 5 crore — has been fetched by his 1959 figurative work ‘Vagabond’ at a 2008 Christie’s auction. This was a time when the art market was booming. The work referred to the miscreant youth of India, misdirected and disenchanted, trapped in a spiral of a false system of belief. Nishad Avari, head of the Department of Indian Art at Christie’s, believes that the record for Ram Kumar lies unmatched since there are very few works of the same quality and importance. “As most of his works are in museum collections, nothing similar has been offered on the market since then,” he says.

Abstractionism was not a popular art form in India, it still isn’t. Maddox feels his abstracts are yet to be valued for the price they could fetch at the auctions. “I think it’s a matter of time and availability of work. While his figurative work is rarer, there are more abstract landscapes which he painted towards the later half of his career. Hence, as the abstracts get bought off from the primary market, i.e. galleries, they will increase in value in the secondary market — auction houses — when they are resold and this will definitely pump up his market.”

Early on, in 1961, Bartholomew wrote of him: “I know he is facing a canvas, or a book, or some quiet corner of himself. Or he must be writing, in that small, neat, feminine hand, letters... If he is not doing any of these routine things, he must be talking passionately but with that calm so characteristic of him. That is because he is sincere and serious. There are a hundred other things that he might be doing, of course. Things that we do. But with what consequence? A quiet man, a quiet painter, and a painter of the remembrance of things past, this is life for Ram Kumar.” That’s how he remained for the next five decades. And that is how he is remembered.

Silence in words

Ram Kumar the writer preceded Ram Kumar the painter. His brother Nirmal Verma wrote (‘Ram Kumar: A Journey Within’) that with time, the two drifted apart and Ram Kumar increasingly became a ‘painterly painter’ rather than a narrator of words. However, his sensitivity towards the minutest of things around him made him special, says Prayag Shukla, who edited an anthology of his stories for Vadehra Art Gallery. “Ram Kumar was able to listen to low voices. Like that of crickets, who figured in a lot of his stories,” he says. Kumar published eight collections of short stories, two novels and a travelogue, besides writing for several magazines. Over the years, his writings have been translated into English by the likes of Sara Rai, granddaughter of Munshi Premchand, and Girdhar Rathi.

Restoring Ram Kumar

In 2014, six Ram Kumar paintings were received at the INTACH Conservation Institute (ICI), New Delhi. Nilabh Sinha, Principal Director of ICI, says the paintings (mostly from the 1960s) depicted paint layer loss and flaking, uneven coating, stains, and dust and dirt build-up. The conservation treatments to address the deterioration set in the paintings included detailed scientific documentation and analysis local consolidation of flaking paint layer, careful cleaning of the painting from front and reverse to remove layers of dirt and varnish as these had become dull and yellow with time. The stains and uneven coatings were removed by solvent cleaning. In order to get rid of the bulges and waviness, the paint layer was fully consolidated and flattened. To guarantee that the canvas was stretched properly and to strengthen the region, strip lining was applied to the tacking edges. The old stretchers were changed with new ones with beveled edges, and to shield the painting’s back from dust and dirt build-up, a loose cotton cloth lining was draped over the stretcher. Next, the paintings were placed onto the stretchers. Areas with losses were filled with the inert materials. Colours were reintegrated in the regions where there were losses. To increase the paint layer’s lifespan, a protective coating was applied to the artworks.