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Lot 71

 

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The present lot, painted in 1951, a year after Raza had moved to Paris, reflects a brief, but significant point in the artist's career when he was departing from his earlier expressionist style toward a more Cubist approach. Painted in gouache-his preferred medium at the time-it depicts a scene typical of the landscape of Provence, dotted with small towns often enclosed by walls.

Raza's influence both in subject and style, can be... The present lot, painted in 1951, a year after Raza had moved to Paris, reflects a brief, but significant point in the artist's career when he was departing from his earlier expressionist style toward a more Cubist approach. Painted in gouache-his preferred medium at the time-it depicts a scene typical of the landscape of Provence, dotted with small towns often enclosed by walls.

Raza's influence both in subject and style, can be traced to the European master Paul Cezanne, whose works he was introduced to by the French photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson. Bresson had seen Raza's work in 1948 and had found it full of 'colour and emotion' but thought he needed to work on his construction. He said to Raza, "...a painting is constructed like a building on a sound base with walls, base, roof, doors, windows and if it does not have these it is fragile. Paintings are in a way similar; you have to construct a painting with a sense of geometry. Remember the name Paul Cezanne, he mastered construction in painting. His paintings are testimony to his sense of structure." (Ranjit Hoskote, Ashok Vajpeyi, Yashodhara Dalmia and Avni Doshi, Vistaar: S H Raza, Mumbai: Art Musings, 2012, p. 138) This meeting with Bresson fundamentally changed the direction of Raza's art.

At the time Raza was a part of the Progressive Artists' Group in Bombay, and he turned to one of their well-wishers, Emanuel Schlesinger, for books on Cezanne, which stirred in him a desire to study the European masters first hand. After securing a French government scholarship in 1950, he made his way to Paris and spent his first years at the Ecole de Paris. Within a year, his paintings were shown at the Salon de Mai art exhibition, his first international group show, in Paris.

"It was in 1952 that I saw the first works of Raza, recently arrived in Paris from India. They were strange and unusual works: timeless landscapes, uninhabited cities detached from the earth, bathed in cold light. Schematized houses were linked one to another in an endless, sinuous chain... Through an original separation of light and shadow, Raza expressed the contrast of day and of night which haunted him ceaselessly." (Jacques Lassaigne, Cimaise, Art et Architecture Actuels, No. 79, Paris: Cimaise, 1967) Raza's childhood fascination with the lush forests of Madhya Pradesh was transposed to the French countryside, which presented itself as a new opportunity for exploration and experimentation. "The French landscape interested me in a special manner because there I had the message of Cezanne and the possibility of acquiring a technique, a certain understanding of form, values, colour relationships and the orchestration of these fundamental elements without which you are not a painter." (Artist quoted in Hoskote, Vajpeyi, Dalmia, Doshi et al., p. 144) In the decade that followed, Raza's works frequently featured the houses and churches of rural France, as seen in the present lot. In this representation, the landscape takes a geometric form, with houses painted in subtle hues against a subdued backdrop of ochre and blue. There is a sense of clarity in the construction and composition which Raza has successfully learned from his study of Cezanne's painting techniques.

This type of landscape, which focussed on methodical and detailed structure was new for Raza. "Over these works Raza had taken infinite pains. Each shape was carefully related to another, weighed, balanced till it had found its place in the composition which would appear unshakeable. Colour had undergone the most intricate studies to be able to express the finest overtones of a poetic situation. Because that is what these paintings really are: poetic situations. They were as austere and sensitive as the landscape backgrounds in the paintings of the Sienese primitives with their garlands of houses, walls and towers strung across the horizon." (Rudolf von Leyden, Raza, Bombay: Sadanga Publications, 1959, p. 18) The influence of medieval European and early Renaissance art too, is evident in the stylised buildings, the flatness of the perspective and the use of natural colours. At the same time, von Leyden also points to traces of Indian miniature painting in its delineated composition and choice of medium - gouache on paper. "They remind one of the architectural settings and backgrounds of the late medieval paintings with the one difference that, while the miniatures are essentially illustrative, Raza's paintings create an image. They do not tell a story, they exist." (von Leyden, p. 18)

Raza was widely lauded in the French press during this period in the early 1950s when he and fellow Progressives Padamsee and Souza made a mark on the European art scene with their varied styles and approaches to art. The present lot, a small format, with its precise composition is charming and significant for the role it plays in marking the plot points which would eventually lead to Raza's great accomplishments as one of India's earliest Modernists.

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