Artist Ram Kumar passes away

One of India’s modernist masters, Ram Kumar died at the age of 94 in Delhi on Saturday morning. He was best known for his abstract landscape paintings. Some of his most evocative works were inspired by the city of Varanasi, a city that he first visited in 1960 and whose architecture and spirit he revisited, both physically and artistically, many times during his lifetime.


A contemporary of M F Husain, F N Souza and Tyeb Mehta, Ram Kumar comprised the first generation of post-colonial artists who were looking for a new language that was simultaneously global and Indian. The late 1950s and early 1960s saw a transition in Kumar’s art from figurative to landscape painting.

Eventually, Kumar gave up painting figures and came to be considered one of India’s finest abstract painters. He was awarded the Padma Shri in 1972 and the Padma Bhushan in 2010.