Important Notice

S H Raza’s evolution as an artist can be traced through his landscapes and cityscapes, which he evovled throughout his career. Though his earlier works won him acclaim, a meeting with the legendary French photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson brought his technical limitations to the fore. Bresson told him, “There is emotion and colour in your works but they lack construction. You should know that a painting is constructed like a building with a... S H Raza’s evolution as an artist can be traced through his landscapes and cityscapes, which he evovled throughout his career. Though his earlier works won him acclaim, a meeting with the legendary French photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson brought his technical limitations to the fore. Bresson told him, “There is emotion and colour in your works but they lack construction. You should know that a painting is constructed like a building with a base, a foundation, walls, seams, roofs and only then it stands. I will advise you to study Cezanne.” (Ashok Vajpeyi, A Life in Art: S.H. Raza, New Delhi: Art Alive Gallery, 2007, p. 40)

This encounter prompted Raza to train in France. On moving there in 1950, he was quick to throw himself headfirst into France’s thriving cultural life and to immerse himself in Western art. Paul Cézanne’s still lives and landscapes proved a revelation to him: they illustrated how essential construction was to the work of a visual artist. His trips to the French countryside found him moving focus to them as the subject of his works. “The hills, the trees, the houses and churches served him as a kind of pretext for his compositions, for constructing his canvases, in which his starting point is always the subject that he then exceeds by organising the arrangement of shapes and colours.” (Michel Imbert, Raza: An Introduction to his Painting, New Delhi: Rainbow Publishers, 2003, p. 31) He solidified his own sense of pictorial construction with these French landscapes for over a decade. Of his earlier French landscapes, von Leyden says, “Stylized houses, towers, spires meticulously assembled in paintings where they lived their own mysterious life. Raza has entered a ‘classic’ period...Each shape was carefully related to another, weighed, balanced till it had found its place in the composition which would appear unshakable.” (Rudolf von Leyden, Raza, Bombay: Sadanga Publications, 1959, p. 19)

This present lot was made during a transitional period for the artist when he was moving towards gestural abstraction. Abandoning traditional representational techniques and Cézanne’s strict linear constructions, Raza revisits old subjects in novel ways. The spires and other recognisable forms of the French countryside from his previous works are now suggested through abstract forms of red. Critic Michel Imbert notes, “...his paintings consisted solely of multicoloured fireworks, devoid of any geometrical organisation and always based on themes of Nature and its elements. This was the time when the importance of bhava emerged, a profound sentiment guiding the forms and investing the entire canvas." (Imbert, p. 39) Not content with excelling only with technique, Raza created more emotive works in accordance with Indian aesthetic theories. “In time the landscapes became increasingly imaginary and visual reality was more and more supplanted by dream-like views. The painter also realised the necessity to introduce into his paintings a certain degree of rasa, a deep- felt emotion-joy, anguish, fear, or pain-dominated by the alternation of day and night, winter and summer, alternations that had influenced Raza since his childhood spent in the midst of nature.” (Imbert, p. 32)

He achieved this emotional resonance in his works by depending on colour for form. “More importantly, he continued to explore further possibilities of colour, making colour rather than any geometrical design or division, the pivotal element around which his paintings moved. Also, colours were not being used as merely formal elements; they were emotionally charged. Their movements or consonances on the canvases seemed more and more to be provoked by emotions, reflecting or embodying emotive content.” (Vajpeyi, p. 78) The present lot is a great example of the artist evolving his understanding of the emotive and structural capabilities of colour at a crucial period in his practice, as he moves toward complete abstraction.

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