Page 114 - AstaGuru Masters Legacy April 2024

Lot No. 29

RAM KUMAR
1924-2018

UNTITLED
30 x 22 in (76.2 x 56 cm)
Acrylic on paper
2014
Signed & Dated: Verso

` 10,00,000 - 15,00,000 | $12,195 - 18,293

Provenance: Property from a collection based
in New Delhi.

Prolific artist Ram Kumar was devoted to his craft,
so much so that he quit his comfortable banking
career to pursue art and part-time jobs to support
his passion. In 1949, after his first solo exhibition at
YMCA, Shimla, he decided to move to Paris to study
under famed artist and writer, Andre Lhote. Here,
he was introduced to Lhote’s style of figurative and
still life works that would have an indelible impact on
his life. He also studied under the influential Cubist
artist and sculptor, Fernand Leger around this time.

In the early 1950s, he was active in political circles
where he met poets such as Paul Eluard and Louis
Aragon. He also worked as a freelance journalist
and travelled extensively through Berlin, Prague and
Warsaw. During this time, he explored the human
condition through figurative works and there was a
growing Cubist influence in his works. He was also
drawn to the traumas of not only the partition in India
but the ravages of war in Europe. His socialist ideology
was visible in the solitude seen in his paintings. These
semi-abstract figurative works were indicative of the
impression post-Cubism made on the artist. Only
upon his return to India in 1952, finding figuration too
mechanical for his style, did Kumar begin to paint his
signature abstract landscapes.