cover image: Banaras Scene

20.500.12592/sdhwp6

Banaras Scene

This painting is created by an Indian artist Ram Kumar. A majority of Ram Kumar's paintings show the tragic side of urban life, young middle-class boys, financial insecurity problems, unemployment victims of the joint family, etc. His landscapes provide a remarkable illustration of how flat areas of light and dark are organized on the pictorial surface with three-dimensional considerations that are only representational. From 60's onwards, the figure disappears and the image of the physical world that is of landforms, rocks, hills, houses, birds, stretches of water, sky and clouds; nature in totality with its varied physiognomy seems to engage him. His landscapes, actual (such as Varanasi) or imaginary, offer scope for form-structure manipulation wherein the subject and style mutually support each other.
artwork modern painting
Identifier
ngma-01847
Material
Oil, Canvas
Note
Ram Kumar born in 1924 and grew up in a large middle class family with eight other siblings in Shimla, Himachal Pradesh. He studied masters in Economics from St. Stephens, from Delhi University. He has an interest in Arts and started practicing on his own. He took evening classes at the Sharada Ukil School of Art which was one of the two main centres of activity in the latter half of 1940's in visual arts other being the AIFACS, under Sailoz Mookherjee. He left the country to study further in Paris under Andre Lhote and Fernand Leger, two major painters of France. He has been awarded with the John D. Rockefeller III Fellowship, New York, 1970; Padmashree, Government of India, 1972; Padma Bhushan, Government of India, 2010 and a fellowship by Lalit Kala Academy and also the Officers Arts et letters, Government of France, 2003. His paintings appear to be spontaneous, they are in fact, carefully built up to achieve a dynamic feeling of asymmetry and relief to our aesthetic sensibility. From 60's onwards, the figure disappears and the image of the physical world that is of land forms, rocks, hills, houses, birds stretches of water, sky and clouds; nature in totality with its varied physiognomy seems to engage him. His landscapes, actual (such as Varanasi) or imaginary, offer a scope for form-structure manipulation wherein the subject and style mutually support each other.
Pages
97 x 62 cm
Published in
India
Type
Painting