Description

Ram Kumar was born in Simla in 1924 and later moved to New Delhi, where he pursued his economics degree from St. Stephens college. He studied art under the tutelage of Sailoz Mookherjea. In 1950, he left for Paris, where he would continue his studies with the great masters André Lhote and Fernand Léger.

Ram Kumar is regarded as one of the first Indian painters to give up figurativism for abstract art. In the winter of 1960, Ram Kumar visited the holy city of Varanasi (Benares) with M F Husain which prompted a significant shift in his painterly style. Seeking to capture the haunted nature of his experience in a novel way, the artist moved away from figuration and started to paint a series of landscapes devoid of the usual constituents of reality and where the human figure was noticeably absent.