Padma Bhushan, 2010[3] Lifetime Achievement Award,Government of Delhi[4] Officers Arts et Letter, 2003 Kalidas Samman, 1986 Premchand Puraskar, 1972 Padmashree, 1972 Ram Kumar (23 September 1924[6] – 14 April 2018) was an Indian artist and writer who has been described as one of India's foremost abstract painters.

[10] Ram Kumar Verma was born in Shimla, the capital of the Indian state of Himachal Pradesh in a large middle-class family of eight brothers and sisters.

[15] One evening, after "loitering" around Connaught Place with his friends from St Stephen's College, he landed up at an art exhibition.

[20] He convinced his father to pay for a one-way ticket to Paris and studied further there under Andre Lhote and Fernand Léger.

[29] The human condition is the main concern of the painter[30] manifested in his early works by the alienated individual within the city.

[31] Increasingly abstract works done in sweeping strokes of paint evoke both exultation of natural spaces and more recently an incipient violence within human habitation.

[34] Lal Bhi Udhaas Ho Sakta Hai (Even Red Can be Sad), a 2015 documentary feature directed by Amit Dutta and produced by the Government of India's Films Division charts the various works of Kumar.