Important Notice

“Away from India, I am constantly concerned with all that is happening at home. I am keen to reach the sources that have nourished me as a child, the ideals and concepts that have grown in my mind during the years, with greater awareness and meaning.” - S H RAZA

Jaipur comes from a period of great transformation in S H Raza’s art. He had been making several visits to India over the 1970s, travelling to his native village in... “Away from India, I am constantly concerned with all that is happening at home. I am keen to reach the sources that have nourished me as a child, the ideals and concepts that have grown in my mind during the years, with greater awareness and meaning.” - S H RAZA

Jaipur comes from a period of great transformation in S H Raza’s art. He had been making several visits to India over the 1970s, travelling to his native village in Madhya Pradesh as well as other less familiar parts of the country, including Rajasthan, the focus of the present lot. These visits to places new and old prompted him to draw from the sensorial and emotional content of his journeys in his art. “Raza was getting himself away from the need to paint what he saw, he was drawn more to paint what he recalled... It was not romantic nostalgia but Raza was torn between two worlds: the tumultuous present, the tranquil past. Beauty and fear coming together again as in the beginning of his life.” (Ashok Vajpeyi ed., A Life in Art: S H Raza, New Delhi: Art Alive Gallery, 2007, p. 80)

Further, Raza’s engagement with Indian forms, colours, and philosophies during his travels had him questioning the “Indianness” of his work. He wondered how he could “go back to his roots, recapture some of the concepts in visual terms for modern times. He wished to integrate the essence of his life experiences, his childhood memories, the celebrative aesthetics of India with the plastic skills and sophistication he had so assiduously learnt and imbibed in France.” (Vajpeyi ed, p. 111)

Raza’s travels also led him to turn to the spiritual and metaphysical aspects of nature, and compelled him to incorporate these principles into his work. He became preoccupied with capturing the all-encompassing, nurturing and powerful character of nature and the natural environs humans inhabit. “Nature, for this artist, is something eternally alive. It is embedded in the cosmos as a whole and actually does not refer to the world we live in today, but is open to evolutionary questions such as the ‘where from’ and ‘where to’. What we see reminds us of many regions and worlds, which exist in the mind and imagination as well as in reality, and, therefore, must be recognised. Raza believes that nature moves itself rather than being moved by the beholder.” (Friedhelm Mennekes, “Soft Polarity,” S. H. Raza – Paintings from 1966 to 2003, Berlin: The Fine Art Resource, 2003)

Rajasthan, in particular, held a powerful grip on his imagination during this period. He found himself drawing from the vibrant landscapes of the region as well as from Rajput miniature paintings, creating a rich body of work using bright scorching colours and strong brushstrokes evoking the spirit of his homeland. The present lot, a rare representation of the Rajasthani capital city of Jaipur, is among these paintings. It occupies an important place in the artist’s oeuvre, demonstrating his emphasis on emotional subjectivity over representation.

Raza’s canvases from this period were emotional essays, full of colour and vibrant movement that recalled the passion and warmth of India’s tropical climate. “Inevitably, freedom is accompanied by remembrance, and for Raza this brought home the hot, burning colours of miniatures from Mewar and Malwa, the searing sensations of his own land. Even as the acrylic medium lends the painting a fluid vibrance, Raza’s tempestuous gestures, the tongues of flame in paintings like Rajasthan, will be immortalised.” (Yashodara Dalmia, “Journeys with the Black Sun,” The Making of Modern Indian Art: The Progressives, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2001, pp. 154-155)

He concentrated on a few selective colours, assembled and reassembled to simulate the emotions invoked by the Indian landscapes he had encountered. “... 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. The earlier objectivity, or perhaps the distance started getting replaced or at least modified by an emergent subjectivity - colours started to take the light load of emotions more than ever before.” (Vajpeyi ed., p. 78)

As noted by critic Richard Bartholomew, colour serves as “the legend” to Raza’s landscapes, taking on the role of subject or form as well as medium This is “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… There is hardly a patch of colour that is passive... What Raza really shows us of a landscape is what we would remember of it.’ (Rati Bartholomew, Pablo Bartholomew, Carmen Kagal and Rosalyn D’Mello eds., Richard Bartholomew: The Art Critic, New Delhi: BART, 2012, p. 339) This is evident in Jaipur, which employs a palette of red, green, browns and black, each tone expressing a different emotional register as well as evoking the warm colours of the Rajasthani landscape. With this use of colour, Raza captures the essence of the place gesturally, as well as thematically. “Rajasthan becomes a metaphor for the colours of India... Rajasthan is the mapping out of a metaphorical space in the mind... The image becomes thus enshrined as an icon, as sacred geography.” (Geeti Sen, Bindu: Space and Time in Raza’s Vision, New Delhi: Media Transasia Ltd., 1997, p. 98)

Furthermore, Raza’s compositions became more structured, with geometry, framing and panels separating forms within the canvas as is evident in Jaipur. The border which encloses his colourful forms is rendered in a style reminiscent of Jain and Rajput miniature paintings, which were a major source of inspiration for him. According to Geeti Sen, the treatment hints at “figures and the interiors of palaces which you find in Rajput narratives.” (Sen, pp. 102-103)

A version of the bindu, the most powerful of Raza’s geometric motifs, occupies a prominent place in Jaipur. Represented as a large black orb here, this concentrated point symbolises both the beginning and end of the cosmos from which all matter and life is generated, and into which it is eventually reabsorbed. The motif “symbolises the seed, bearing the potential of all life, in a sense. It is also a visible form containing all the essential requisites of line, tone, colour, texture and space. The black space is charged with latent forces aspiring for fulfilment.” (Artist quoted in Sen, p. 134)

First introduced into his paintings in the 1950s as a black sun looming in the background of a Provencal landscape - the bindu emerged from the artist’s preoccupation with formal order and geometry, as well as an exploration of nature and spirituality. As Raza explains, “For me at that initial stage, bindu not only represented the primordial symbol or the seed. It also represented for me a point, which could be enlarged to a circle - one of the most significant geometrical forms.” (Artist quoted in Sen, p. 12)

Over subsequent decades the presence of a dark spot or area within his works grew stronger moving from the periphery of the canvas to a central focal point. His travels to India, particularly his return to his native village where he had been first introduced to the bindu as a child, prompted this evolution further leading to the bindu manifesting in works such as the present lot. By the 1980s the bindu would become a dominant element around which he would structure his canvases, as can be observed in lot 24. It became a “compact energy pulsating in the night of the cosmos like a black star, the womb of the universe from which new worlds are on the point of exploding.” (Rudolf Von Leyden, “Metamorphosis,” Raza, Mumbai: Chemould Publications and Arts, 1985) For Raza, this development of the black moon into an abstract symbol was not a move away from nature but a move to its very essence, an expression of nature in its simplest visual meaning, the form of the bindu as a compression or seed of all life in the universe.

The present lot represents a significant milestone in Raza’s journey of self-discovery, as well as in his artistic path towards becoming one of India’s best known modernists

“In my opinion, colour in Rajasthan represents ecstasy. The Jain and Rajput miniatures have always been a source of inspiration for me.” - S H RAZA

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