Important Notice

Between time spent as a member of the Progressive Artists’ Group in Bombay in the late 1940s to his subsequent move to France, Raza’s artistic career centred on the pursuit of ‘significant form’ - a term coined by the renowned British critic Clive Bell to describe that perfect combination of line, colour and shape which leads, via emotion, to a “world of aesthetic ecstasy” (Clive Bell, “Art and Significant Form”, Art, 1913).

This quest... Between time spent as a member of the Progressive Artists’ Group in Bombay in the late 1940s to his subsequent move to France, Raza’s artistic career centred on the pursuit of ‘significant form’ - a term coined by the renowned British critic Clive Bell to describe that perfect combination of line, colour and shape which leads, via emotion, to a “world of aesthetic ecstasy” (Clive Bell, “Art and Significant Form”, Art, 1913).

This quest eventually led the artist from painting French landscapes to mapping out the terrain of his homeland on his canvas. Through forms conjured in shades of scorched reds, earthy yellows and dense browns, Raza worked fervently to capture the essence of his hometown, Babaria, located in the Mandala district of Madhya Pradesh, Central India.

His sojourn back to India was firmly rooted in the Indian aesthetic theory of Rasa often interpreted as the concept of aesthetic experience derived from any form of art with the prescribed use of colours and expressions, which in turn “re-sensitized his perceptiveness for a final supreme and universal viewing of nature, not as appearance, not as spectacle but as an integrated force of life and cosmic growth reflected in every fibre of a human being...Nature became to Raza something not to be observed or to be imagined but something to be experienced in the very act of putting paint on canvas” (Rudolf Von Leyden, “Metamorphosis”, Raza, Mumbai: Chemould Publications and Arts, 1985).

Raza’s intimate connection and approach to nature led him to develop a new and highly concentrated symbolic idiom. Here, he began to present nature in its most fundamental form, often inspired by tantric beliefs and the ancient Indian cosmology of the Vedas. As the artist noted, “In terms of painting, immense possibilities seemed to open, based on elementary geometric forms: the point, the circle, vertical, horizontal and diagonal lines, the triangles and the square” (Geeti Sen, Bindu: Space and Time in Raza’s Vision, New Delhi: Media Transasia Ltd, 1997, p. 126). Raza’s innate Indian sensibility further began to manifest through his work, with this period marking the start of his artistic rebirth. It ultimately fueled his quest to understand the significant form, which was “...the result of two parallel inquiries. Firstly, it aimed at pure plastic order, form order. Secondly, it concerns the theme of nature. Both have converged into a single point and become inseparable...” (Artist quoted in Geeti Sen, Bindu: Space and Time in Raza's Vision, New Delhi: Media Transasia Ltd, 1997, p. 134).

The present lot features an amalgamation of Raza’s gestural brushwork, steeped in the prescribed structure of the theory of rasa, where forms and colours are essential to evoke a deeply aesthetic experience, charged by emotions and metaphors. Here, the artist weaves a network of bold horizontal lines and planes, alongside triangular symbols of purush and prakriti, the male and female energies that kindle life. While Raza’s compositions began to take on a more geometric approach during this transition, his otherwise vivid palette sought out the deep, earthy tones of the Indian landscape. In La Terre, Raza adopts shades of ochre, umber, sienna, red and brown, an ode to the searing heat and passion of Central India, that coloured his own childhood. Raza’s artistic shift during this period saw him place focus on his Indian identity, which eventually guided him to develop a fascinatingly unique pictorial language that further matured over the course of his career.

Read More
Artist Profile
Other works of this artist in: this auction  |  entire site