Important Notice

“I have traversed a long path and time in research and assimilation before finding my own vision.”
- S H RAZA

Even before his move to France, Raza had demonstrated an interest in French art. Belonging to that cohort of young Indian artists who were dissatisfied with their stale training in British academic realism, his exposure to Georges Braque, Henri Matisse and Georges Rouault at an exhibition of large prints of contemporary... “I have traversed a long path and time in research and assimilation before finding my own vision.”
- S H RAZA

Even before his move to France, Raza had demonstrated an interest in French art. Belonging to that cohort of young Indian artists who were dissatisfied with their stale training in British academic realism, his exposure to Georges Braque, Henri Matisse and Georges Rouault at an exhibition of large prints of contemporary French artists in Bombay ignited in him a burning need to see the originals. Raza was already feeling his work stagnate in the late 40s when Henri Cartier-Bresson looked over his fluid watercolours and advised him to study the recent European masters to get a better understanding of pictorial construction. He said, “There is emotion and colour in your works but they lack construction. You should know that a painting is constructed like a building with a base, a foundation, walls, seams, roofs and only then it stands. I will advise you to study Cezanne.” (Bresson as quoted in Ashok Vajpeyi, A Life in Art: S.H. Raza, New Delhi: Art Alive Gallery, 2007, p. 40)

Raza eagerly steeped himself in French cultural life on reaching Europe in 1950. He immediately became a devoted visitor of the renowned Parisian museums, being particularly moved by Van Gogh’s use of colour and Paul Cézanne’s compositions which he said “restored me to tranquillity with their straight lines.” (The artist as quoted in “Journeys with the Black Sun: Sayed Haider Raza,” Yashodhara Dalmia, The Making of Modern Indian Art: The Progressives, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2001, p. 151) He travelled to Provence and the Maritime Alps and became enamoured with the French countryside. It became his primary subject for well over a decade and “the French landscape with its trees, mountains, villages, and churches became his staple diet.” (Dalmia, 2001, p. 152) This locale became the site of formal experimentation in his art and the subject on which he reworked his pictorial conception. Gouache in tempera gave way to impasto in oil and his works became increasingly Cubist in character as his newly-gained le sens plastique nudged him towards a more steadfast understanding of his elements. Signature architecture of the countryside of his adopted country-churches, towers and spires- began populating his canvas in crisp flattened geometric forms that were diligently assembled with care given to the arrangement of each form in the composition.

This present lot, made in 1957, exemplifies the “epiphanic orchestrations of tones and shapes” (Yashodhara Dalmia, “The Burning Landscape,” Sayed Haider Raza: The Journey of an Iconic Artist, Noida: Harper Collins, 2021, p. 78) typical of his landscapes of this era while also displaying his gradual move towards the gestural. The solid, geometric forms of the early French landscapes are caught in the process of gradually dissolving in intimation of the artist’s imminent gestural phase. Raza layers paint onto the canvas in deliberate strokes whose textural heft plays up the intensity of his lines, an element the artist believes to be of vital importance to his compositions. “In the beginning it is a point, a point in movement, charged with energy, capable of infinite variety of manifestations. Straight or curved, relaxed or tensioned, the line, an alive entity moves in total freedom, generates lines, multiplies itself in space, developing territories of forms and shapes.” (The artist as quoted in Vajpeyi, 2007, p. 187) Raza’s lines, vibrating with energy, break up the plane of the composition to give a simultaneous aerial and frontal view of the landscape, very like Raza’s others that “glow in their own ambience.” (Dalmia, 2021, p. 76)

The blazing yellows, reds, oranges, greens and intense browns are reminiscent of the Rajput and Pahari miniatures Raza held in great esteem for their “newly perceived formal order of colour orchestration.” (The artist in Ursula Bickelmann and Nissim Ezekiel eds., “S. H. Raza”, Contemporary Art - Syntheses and Polarities, Marg Volume 38 No. 4, New Delhi: Marg Publications, 1984, p. 16) The artist was always given to using the bold palette of Indian miniatures but his metamorphosis in the 1950s saw “his colours take on an entirely new complexion…Shapes dissolve in seas of colours which are by no means unorganised and fluid but seem to move and evolve within the space of the painting.” (Rudy von Leyden, Raza, Bombay: Sadganga, 1959, p. 19) The blocks of fields of crackling oranges, reds and deeps browns and shocks of bright green create a fevered tonal pitch, marrying the drama of Rajput and Pahari palettes to the formal construction of Western art through a studious attention to the theories and techniques of both schools in what art critic Rudy von Leyden termed an act of love by the artist. “The scholar, who had measured and calculated, burst through the confines of a limited understanding of colour and space-created-by-colour into a sphere of full realisation. The transformation created such passion that one could best describe this age of Raza as the age of the Lover. This triumphant handling of paint, this living in paint can only be understood as an act of love.” (von Leyden, p. 19)

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