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Lot 7

 

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Once he arrived in France in 1950, Raza's body of work underwent several dramatic shifts. Joining the Ecole de Paris and finally encountering the work of artists like Cezanne and Van Gogh in person, he began to experiment with formal devices like composition and structure, and also altered his medium and palette. Speaking of the artist's work from the period, Jacques Lassaigne, then Director of the Museum of Modern Art, Paris, noted, "There... Once he arrived in France in 1950, Raza's body of work underwent several dramatic shifts. Joining the Ecole de Paris and finally encountering the work of artists like Cezanne and Van Gogh in person, he began to experiment with formal devices like composition and structure, and also altered his medium and palette. Speaking of the artist's work from the period, Jacques Lassaigne, then Director of the Museum of Modern Art, Paris, noted, "There began to appear now out of his studio, after long and arduous work, a new type of landscape. Stylized houses, towers, spires meticulously assembled in paintings where they lived their own mysterious life. They did not seem to belong to any age o man…Over these works Raza had taken infinite pains. Each shape was carefully related to another, weighed, balanced till it had found its place in the composition which would appear unshakeable" (as quoted in Rudolf Von Leyden, Raza, Sadanga Publications, 1959, p. 18).

According to Lassaigne, these paintings "…were as austere and as sensitive as the as the landscape backgrounds in the paintings of the Sienese primitives with their garlands of houses, walls and towers strung across the horizon…The impact made in Paris by these strange paintings by a 'peintre hindou' was fairly strong. They did not seem to fit into any ready-made pigeon holes of classified styles, and yet fascinated because of the particular mood of their own" (Ibid.).

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