AT Sotheby’s Indian art auction last month, one of artist Ram Kumar’s works—a landscape in ochre-black, made in the ’70s—crossed the magic Rs 1 crore mark. On surpassing contemporaries like Tyeb Mehta and Maqbool Fida Husain, Kumar received several congratulatory phone calls including one from his long-time friend and artist Satish Gujral. But ironically, the artist doesn’t recall working on that landscape. ‘‘I don’t remember painting that one,’’ he says.Delhi-based Kumar is as absorbed in his art today as he was 30 years ago. It’s just another morning for the 81-year-old master. He applies a spot of red paint in one corner of a blank canvas. A dab of grey in another corner, and the canvas begins to breathe. One of India’s seminal abstract artists, the challenge of bringing a blank canvas alive still perturbs him. ‘‘It’s scary because if I apply one wrong stroke, the whole painting goes wrong,’’ says Kumar.After a Masters in Economics from Delhi University, Kumar had a short stint with the Hindustan newspaper soon after Independence. He gave up a professional career to study art under theoretician Andre Lhote, in Paris, in the early 1950s. He began as a figurative artist, but the form could not stimulate him for long. ‘‘Humanity is an important part of my work, which, I felt, was not possible to depict in the figurative form,’’ the artist says. Kumar is one of the few painters who never returned to the figurative form, but he has had a long obsession with landscapes. Memories of his visits to Ladakh in the ’60s are still fresh on his mind. ‘‘In Ladakh, it was all rock, rock, rock, and being accustomed to the green hills of Shimla, my hometown, it had a deep emotional impact on me,’’ Kumar says.He also remembers his first visit to Benaras in the early ’60s, a city which forms the backdrop of his famed Varanasi series. ‘‘I went with Husain and lived in a big house that belonged to author Premchand. We used to go our separate ways to sketch in the morning and meet in the evening,’’ he recalls.Unlike his paintings, Kumar’s short stories in Hindi deal with real events and people. His five collections of stories—Husna Bibi, Ek Cheera, Jhinguro Ke Swar, Dimak and Chittalehk—are not as well known as his art, but words have allowed Kumar to find the perfect harmony between abstraction and reality. Maitreyee Handique
