Important Notice

Between 1954 and 1965, S H Raza travelled extensively through France, including to Carcassone and Provence in the south. His work from this time is based on the rich colours and textures of the French landscape. "The French landscape is extraordinary: the villages seem situated so beautifully in the context of nature." (Raza quoted in Ashok Vajpeyi, Passion: Life and Art of Raza, New Delhi: Rajkamal Books, 2005, p. 57)

... Between 1954 and 1965, S H Raza travelled extensively through France, including to Carcassone and Provence in the south. His work from this time is based on the rich colours and textures of the French landscape. "The French landscape is extraordinary: the villages seem situated so beautifully in the context of nature." (Raza quoted in Ashok Vajpeyi, Passion: Life and Art of Raza, New Delhi: Rajkamal Books, 2005, p. 57)

Orange and Green Townscape (lot 29) and Yellow Townscape (lot 31) are vibrant examples of Raza's exploration of the relationship between colour and form, which became his main preoccupation in the 1950s. The French countryside is captured by houses painted in structured planes of white which are sandwiched between freely mixed colour fields, evoking Cezanne's landscapes. Painted two years after Raza won the prestigious Prix de La Critique award which received extensive worldwide press coverage, they break away from Raza's earlier academic paintings by placing greater emphasis on the emotive quality of colour.

Raza's shift in focus was influenced by his encounter with photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson whom he met in Srinagar in 1948. On Bresson's advice, Raza moved to France to study at the Ecole Nationale des Beaux-Arts in Paris, in 1950. He attended several exhibitions and carefully studied and analysed the works of European artists. He was especially drawn to the constructive qualities and emotive colours of Paul Cezanne and Henri Matisse.

Writing for Thought in 1959, Richard Bartholomew commented on the orchestration of colour in Raza's work from this period: "Colour is the legend to each of these landscapes, because in each painting the flesh and form of colour are organic to the skeletal structure, we see the anatomy but not the division of the drawing. Therefore, there is no seductive line to give you the sense of the thing. Trees, houses, roads, streams, the undulation of the land, the falling shadows, the perpendicularity, the levelness, the foreground and the horizon all shift and throb with the life of colour, and the scene is not static. There is hardly a patch of colour that is passive." (Richard Bartholomew, The Art Critic, New Delhi: Bart, 2012, p. 339)

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