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"The geometry is established but the actual relation to colour with another colour is a question of harmony... Colours can reveal innumerable human sentiments that we are capable of and I am trying to make them live on the canvas." - S H RAZA

S H Raza’s invocations are embedded in deep and abiding faith, delicately instilled with the poetry of form and colour symbolism. He is fondly remembered as “a believer to the core. He often... "The geometry is established but the actual relation to colour with another colour is a question of harmony... Colours can reveal innumerable human sentiments that we are capable of and I am trying to make them live on the canvas." - S H RAZA

S H Raza’s invocations are embedded in deep and abiding faith, delicately instilled with the poetry of form and colour symbolism. He is fondly remembered as “a believer to the core. He often says that without divine powers coming to your help, you cannot create… He bows down his head before the canvas before starting to paint and he bows again after he has finished the day’s work of painting.” (Ashok Vajpeyi, “Celebration and Prayer,” Yet Again: Nine New Essays on Raza, Kolkata: Akar Prakar in collaboration with The Raza Foundation and in association with Mapin Publishing, 2015, p. 88) He was consistent in visiting a temple, mosque, and church every week, but did not follow any stringent rituals. Spiritually and aesthetically guided, his canvases permeate a vision that strove towards a true artistic expression rooted in self-enquiry.

Born in 1922 in Babaria, Madhya Pradesh, Raza received his early education from the Nagpur School of Art and later at the J J School of Art, Bombay. An intimate connection with nature accompanied him throughout his life, resonating in his oeuvre. After growing up in the midst of lush forests, his move to Mumbai was unnerving but offered immense potential. Raza recollects, “I could scarcely conceal my nervousness. Yet, I was attentive and determined… Product as I was of Madhya Pradesh, I was still living with their rhythm.” (“S H Raza”, Ursula Bickelmann and Nissim Ezekiel eds., Artists Today: East-West Visual Arts Encounter, Bombay: Marg Publications, 1987, p. 15)

Raza, along with his contemporaries in newly Independent India, was riddled with questions but full of zeal for new beginnings. A heightened search for their roots and identity dominated their practice— “Now, we wanted to understand the forces that shaped us, the destiny that was to be ours. There began a restless period of enquiry into our own values, culture, art, our life itself.” (Ursula Bickelmann and Nissim Ezekiel eds., p. 15) This passion led Raza to found the Progressive Artists’ Group in 1947 along with F N Souza and M F Husain among others. The group was widely recognised and catapulted into greater engagement with critics, patrons, and fellow artists. Various kinds of exposures influenced them; “Two major exhibitions moved us greatly at that time. The first was the vast exhibition of ancient Indian art in Delhi… The other exhibition consisted of large prints of modern French painters presented by the French consulate in Bombay, exposing to us the works of Braque, Rouault, and Matisse… We were seized by the desire to see the original works in international art centres, and ultimately some of us left for Europe.” (Ursula Bickelmann and Nissim Ezekiel eds., p. 18)

Raza set sail for France in 1950, embarking on a journey that would influence his practice for decades. He studied at the École Nationale des Beaux-Arts in Paris and travelled across France, Italy and Spain. He largely painted landscapes in “a florid open style with an emphasis on spontaneity and a great desire for exploring the capabilities of oil paint.” (Krishen Khanna, “The Isolation of All the Forces That Comprise Art,” Yet Again: Nine New Essays on Raza, Kolkata: Akar Prakar in Collaboration with The Raza Foundation and in Association with Mapin Publishing, 2015, p. 16) His works grew more gestural and were a site of constant learning and exploring. Through the 1960s and 1970s, the artist’s works moved away from figurative and representational forms, towards geometricity and created composite works in his preferred medium of acrylic. Though he had become an established painter in Paris, Raza never really left his Indian roots. “From the 1960s and the early ’70s, when he was nearing fifty, Raza’s works are impregnated with a sense of double identity.” (Geeti Sen, Bindu: Space and Time in Raza’s Vision, New Delhi: Media Transasia India Ltd, 1997, p. 87) Memory and nostalgia of his motherland, Madhya Pradesh, began to play an active and fascinating role in his compositions and colours.

Raza’s yearning for home compelled him to return to India on several occasions— “With Janine he returned in 1959 to ‘his native village’, and again in 1962 to visit with his teacher Shri Bapuraoji Athawade.” (Sen, p. 91) He and his wife also travelled to other states, particularly Rajasthan and Gujarat, collecting souvenirs as remembrances of the vibrancy of India’s colours and textures.

Raza illustrates, “All these images revived and refreshed my memory. I personally feel that as you go to different countries, you assimilate new ideas. All this is returned back to the sources which have been important to you from your childhood. Other elements, views, ideas, colour perceptions for instance, which are very strong in India-they come back to you with a new vitality. You are conscious of them. And as the work grows, as ideas grow, you incorporate these into your work.” (Artist quoted in Sen, p. 83) During his travels to Bhopal, Raza discovered the poetry of Gajanan Madhav Muktibodh, among other poets, which lent a distinct association of Indian spiritual thought to his paintings. Nature and childhood memories in Madhya Pradesh, as well as India at large, increasingly became crucial elements that played a central role in his work during the 1970s and 1980s.

The stylistic evolution and approach that marked this period is characterised by a heightened focus on lines, forms, and colours as seen in the present lot. Raza delved into the vast potential of geometric forms, ultimately culminating in what would become a defining motif in his mature pieces-the bindu. “In Earth (1986), the circular black orb rotates as a central pivot while deep brown, mud brown, black, blue, dark green and black evolve as bands of colour pushing downward in their weight. At the same time, ochre, rust, black, pale yellow, and orange levitate upwards.” (Yashodhara Dalmia, “Journeys With the Black Sun,” The Making of Modern Indian Art, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2001, p. 160) His endeavour to portray the textures of his hometown dictates the colour palette.

A developed and refined vocabulary of form can be noticed, fuelled by the symbolic use of geometry and orchestrated colours. Commenting on Raza’s works from this time, Ranjit Hoskote writes, “In those paintings, he mediated on an enigmatic burning darkness, a glow of black and red, equal parts earth and fire: intimate as miniatures yet magnificent as panoramas, these works were evidently inspired by childhood memories of the forests of Madhya Pradesh, then the central provinces of British India.” (Ranjit Hoskote, “The Cartographer of Lost Continents: Thoughts on S. H. Raza’s Art,” Vistaar: S H Raza, Mumbai: Afterimage Publishing, 2012, p. 16) Earth, 1986, effectively translates Raza’s artistic quest of the preceding two decades into a masterpiece that showcases remarkable composition, style, and scale.

The present lot is anchored at the centre featuring the bindu which, in Indian metaphysics denotes shunya or a void representing immense potent energy. It is also perceived as a bija or seed containing concentrated life force. The focussed stillness of the bindu is split with several horizontal lines that are intersected with vertical lines across the canvas generating colours and a charged space. Raza was also influenced by the broad stream of Indian philosophical thought to include Tantric beliefs and the use of Yantras for its evocative values, and the emotive power of forms and colours discussed in the Rasa theory. Further, in the present lot the intersecting lines create triangles that denote “a primary enclosure since space cannot be bounded by fewer than three lines. Hence it is a root matrix of nature where, in its inverted form, it is feminine power while the triangle, with its apex upwards, denotes the male principle.” (Dalmia, p. 163)

Raza’s awareness of his Indian identity is pronounced during this period when he created works that were cultivated from nature as well as Indian philosophical, spiritual and cosmological concepts. “What he has been painting is not only interrelated shapes painted with dexterity and with great awareness of the potency of colours, but paintings evocative of certain states of being. The formal shapes in their selected colours are inextricably bound with the states which they create… His achievements, the acme of devotion and persistence, are a matter of pride for all of us.” (Khanna, p. 19)

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