Ram Kumar
Ram Kumar was born in 1924 in Shimla. Kumar received his Master’s Degree in Economics from St. Stephen’s College, New Delhi. Following this, he went to Paris to study painting under Andre Lhote and Fernard Leger. Ram Kumar was amongst India’s leading modernists and is said to be one of the first Indian artists to give up figurativism for abstract art. The artist was captivated by, or rather obsessed with, the human face because of the ease and intensity with which it registers the drama of life. The sad, desperate, lonely, hopeless or lost faces, which fill the canvases of his early period, render with pathos his view of human condition. It is pertinent because what Ram Kumar tried to do in his early work is something more profound than merely pointing to what can be cured by acts of social engineering. It is significant that at this stage when Ram Kumar took a decisive step into what is known as the non-figurative world of abstraction, he also bid farewell to the literary moorings and its expressionistic entourage.