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Lot 51

 

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S H Raza’s earliest encounters with European art began in the 1950s after the artist moved to France to study painting at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. This was a period of exploration for Raza, who travelled across France, as well as to Italy and Spain. “Landscapes, people — other artists thrilled him as much as the works of art of many ages and nations that he met face to face for the first time.” (Rudy von Leyden, Raza, Bombay:... S H Raza’s earliest encounters with European art began in the 1950s after the artist moved to France to study painting at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. This was a period of exploration for Raza, who travelled across France, as well as to Italy and Spain. “Landscapes, people — other artists thrilled him as much as the works of art of many ages and nations that he met face to face for the first time.” (Rudy von Leyden, Raza, Bombay: Vakil & Sons, 1959, p. 18) This exposure, combined with his formal education, led him to understand and appreciate Renaissance and European art, and the use of light, colour, and structure, which in turn influenced his work at the time.

His unique expression led to his art being featured in solo and group exhibitions around the country during this period, and he gained the attention of many important critics including Jacques Lassaigne, the Director of the National Museum of Modern Art in Paris, who noted, “... when a young painter from abroad exhibits for the first time in Paris, his works likely as not, will betray a streak of exoticism inseparable from an exotic background. Yet there was nothing of this in Raza’s pictures... strange, unaccountable works, unamenable to any traditional type of art.” (Jacques Lassaigne quoted in von Leyden, p. 18)

Raza was also the first non-French artist to win the coveted Prix de la Critique award in 1956, gaining widespread recognition and an invitation to show at the Venice Biennale the same year. However, it was his seminal showing at the XXIX Biennale Internazionale d’Arte di Venezia in 1958 that took his reputation to new heights. The 1958 Biennale featured 43 works by 11 modern Indian artists such as Raza, Ram Kumar, Akbar Padamsee, M F Husain, and others. In fact, the London show of the Biennale works that was organised by George Butcher, a reputed art critic, catapulted seven of the 11 artists to great fame thanks to extensive media coverage and tremendously positive responses. Raza was one of the seven.

The present lot – possibly titled Vetriccia, after a town in Corsica, France – was painted almost a decade after Raza’s relocation to France and was a part of the works displayed at the XXIX Venice Biennale in 1958. It marks the transformative period in the artist’s career when he abandoned the recognisable shapes and forms of his early landscapes and shifted towards the gestural. His paintings of this period began to consist “solely of multicoloured fireworks, devoid of any geometrical organisation and always based on themes related to Nature and its elements.” (Michael Imbert, Raza: An Introduction to his Painting, Noida: Rainbow Publishers, 2003, p. 39) Speaking of Raza’s stylistic transformation of this period, art writer Kishore Singh comments, “For an Indian artist to undertake what amounted to a penance-like renunciation of familiar shapes and forms was a huge challenge, but which Raza would embrace for the following two decades of his career.” (Kishore Singh ed., Masterpieces of Indian Modern Art II, New Delhi: DAG, p. 381)

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