Osian's Auction Catalogue Select Masterpieces of Indian Modern and Contemporary Art | June 2009

101 46 Ramkumar (b.1924) Untitled Oil on canvas, 1969 Signed in Devanagari and dated in English ‘Ramkumar 69’ l.r. 34.2 x 24.0 in (86.9 x 61.1 cm) Inscribed in English ‘18 1969’ & camel seal on verso Provenance Private Collection, New Delhi INR 5,600,000 – 7,000,000 USD 116,670 – 145,830 Illustrated Reference Painting from the same series is illustrated in full colour in N. Tuli’s The Flamed – Mosaic : Indian Contemporary Painting . New Delhi : HEART and Mapin Publishing 1997. Plate 165, p.224. “If Ram Kumar’s abstractions still have a strange power to move us, it is because they are not built on denial or negation; they carry within them all the stains and bruises of the preceding periods, their sense of grief and solitude, but now they have been somehow transcended; lifted on a different light, where even the whites and greys have a kind of luminosity…” – Nirmal Verma, rpt. in Ram Kumar: A Retrospective , ExC, NGMA & Vadehra Gallery, 1993