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Lot 41

 

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S H Raza’s art in the 1960s marked an important point in his stylistic evolution. His work began to pivot from highly structured landscapes to non-figurative expression, with colour and texture now being the key focus. Raza’s canvases took on a new form, influenced by European expressionism and abstraction. “He began to submit observed reality to his own structural discipline, painting a series of geometric houses with mathematical precisions...... S H Raza’s art in the 1960s marked an important point in his stylistic evolution. His work began to pivot from highly structured landscapes to non-figurative expression, with colour and texture now being the key focus. Raza’s canvases took on a new form, influenced by European expressionism and abstraction. “He began to submit observed reality to his own structural discipline, painting a series of geometric houses with mathematical precisions... The landscapes are imaginary and timeless, asserting Raza’s preference for a more conceptual vision of nature.” (Amrita Jhaveri, A Guide to 101 Modern and Contemporary Indian Artists, Mumbai: India Book House, 2005, p. 74)

The years that Raza spent at the École de Paris deeply enhanced the artistic vocabulary that he had begun to develop for himself in India during the 1940s. He found a unique way to communicate his vision, with his command over colour and medium coming to the forefront as formal structure receded, as seen in lots 41 and 42. A decade after his arrival in France, Raza found himself enamoured by the French countryside, in addition to travelling to Spain and Italy. Henri Cartier-Bresson’s advice to ‘study Cezanne’ continued to echo through his work, as he “moved out to the countryside; to Cezanne’s Provence... and to the Maritime Alps where the French landscape with its trees, mountains, villages, and churches became his staple diet.” (Yashodhara Dalmia, The Making of Modern Indian Art: The Progressives, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2001, pp. 151-152)

The present lot marks the beginning of Raza’s shift to a more gestural style, along with his change in medium from gouache and tempera to oil paints. The careful construction and objectivity of the previous decade had now begun to wane, leaving room for a new kind of emotional subjectivity. “Thereafter visual reality, the aim to construct a 'tangible' world receded. In its place there was a preoccupation with evoking the essence, the mood of places and of people.” (Artist quoted in Geeti Sen, The Seed and the Fruit: Metaphors in Raza’s Painting, S. H. Raza, London: Saffronart and Berkeley Square Gallery, 2005, p. 6)

This path would gradually lead his works towards geometry and spirituality, making the present lot an important part of the earlier phase where he looked to nature for emotional content. According to French critic Jacques Lassaigne, these were “...strange, un-accountable works, unamenable to any type of traditional art. Timeless landscapes with no accommodation for man; uninhabited, uninhabitable cities, located beyond the confines of the earth, bathed in cold light; schematic houses stretching away in a sinuous line, suspended in the sky beneath a black sun.” (Ashok Vajpeyi ed., A Life in Art: S H Raza, New Delhi: Art Alive Gallery, 2007, p. 64)

These painstakingly constructed landscapes, a testament to Raza’s mastery of colour, brought about a new degree of order to his work. “Perhaps the style developed in Bombay was getting refined and expanded in Paris, imbibing new elements, creating some new and surprising combinations.” (Vajpeyi ed., p. 64)

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