Page 144 - Pundole's Auction M0015

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PROPERTY OF A COLLECTOR

RAM KUMAR

b.?1924

Untitled

Oil on canvas
1979
33? × 46 in. (84.1 × 117 cm.)
Signed in Devanagari and inscribed and dated ‘33 × 47 / 79’
on reverse

??40,00,000?–?60,00,000

$ 59,700?–?89,550

‘There is a spatial quality in the recent painting (1970 onwards), a sense of
flight, of movement, and there is an aerial perspective (sometimes a series of
perspectives), and it seems that the painter is looking at landscape in a
number of ways and from different angles and points of view… The increasing
mastery Ram has acquired over paint – the movement there is in paint
applied sensitively and with a purpose – made Ram decide to go the whole
way, into abstract painting. Though he remembered the “still, sad music of
humanity” it was not the voice of man in distress which concerned him now.
Sometimes it was “the heavy and the weary weight of all this unintelligible
world” which created the mood; sometimes it was the lyricism inherent
in nature which determined the tones of his painting and functioned as
illumination. Ram seemed to have understood what Wordsworth said:
“Nature never did betray the heart that loved her.”’

(Richard Bartholomew reprinted in Ram Kumar A Journey Within, New Delhi, 1996, pp. 30-31)

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