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Lot Essay
“Ramkinkar was singularly reticent and otherworldly as he was single-minded in his commitment to art and humanity.” – R. Siva Kumar
Deeply inspired by nature, the simple, hardworking Santhal tribal people he lived among, and his own folk background, Ramkinkar Baij evolved a unique aesthetic that is now recognised for its instrumental contribution to Indian art history. Regarded as a pioneer of modern Indian sculpture, Baij was also adept with the brush, and "[...] painted like a poet who saw life in every animate and inanimate thing around him." (R. Siva Kumar, Ramkinkar Baij: A Retrospective, New Delhi, 2012, p. 12)
In the mid-1970s, Baij returned to the theme of famine, but as R. Siva Kumar explains, “[…] not on the basis of what he had once seen but on the basis of a story he had heard from his mother, and on his own dreams of her in which he relived the story. In the story recounted by Ramkinkar, one day his mother when she was a girl while carrying food to her father working in the fields comes across a dying man crying for food, she is caught in a dilemma but ignores his plea and proceeds on her errand, and finds the man dead when she returns after serving food. In the paintings – there is one in oil and several in watercolor – she is shown at the moment of encountering the dying man, or at the moment of her existential crisis rather than at the tragic end of the story. If by choosing the moment of her existential crisis he leaves the outcome undecided and ambivalent, it is perhaps because she appeared as the food-giver or Annapurna in his dreams; and there are other drawings in which a monumental female figure is represented distributing food and thus affecting a positive mythic resolution to the story.” (R. Siva Kumar, New Delhi, 2012, p. 390)
Deeply inspired by nature, the simple, hardworking Santhal tribal people he lived among, and his own folk background, Ramkinkar Baij evolved a unique aesthetic that is now recognised for its instrumental contribution to Indian art history. Regarded as a pioneer of modern Indian sculpture, Baij was also adept with the brush, and "[...] painted like a poet who saw life in every animate and inanimate thing around him." (R. Siva Kumar, Ramkinkar Baij: A Retrospective, New Delhi, 2012, p. 12)
In the mid-1970s, Baij returned to the theme of famine, but as R. Siva Kumar explains, “[…] not on the basis of what he had once seen but on the basis of a story he had heard from his mother, and on his own dreams of her in which he relived the story. In the story recounted by Ramkinkar, one day his mother when she was a girl while carrying food to her father working in the fields comes across a dying man crying for food, she is caught in a dilemma but ignores his plea and proceeds on her errand, and finds the man dead when she returns after serving food. In the paintings – there is one in oil and several in watercolor – she is shown at the moment of encountering the dying man, or at the moment of her existential crisis rather than at the tragic end of the story. If by choosing the moment of her existential crisis he leaves the outcome undecided and ambivalent, it is perhaps because she appeared as the food-giver or Annapurna in his dreams; and there are other drawings in which a monumental female figure is represented distributing food and thus affecting a positive mythic resolution to the story.” (R. Siva Kumar, New Delhi, 2012, p. 390)