Important Notice

"My work is my own inner experience and involvement with the mysteries of nature and form which is expressed in colour, line, space and light." - S H RAZA

This magnificent, six foot long, panoramic view of the south of France titled Village en Provence is a rare format for a Raza painting. Raza was at the peak of his engagement with the French countryside when he painted it in 1957, a year after he became the first ever... "My work is my own inner experience and involvement with the mysteries of nature and form which is expressed in colour, line, space and light." - S H RAZA

This magnificent, six foot long, panoramic view of the south of France titled Village en Provence is a rare format for a Raza painting. Raza was at the peak of his engagement with the French countryside when he painted it in 1957, a year after he became the first ever non-French artist to win the prestigious Prix de la Critique. Having gone through earlier phases in which he concentrated on form and structure, here, Raza celebrates the houses, spires, and trees, as well as the land and sky of Provence. "His colours take on an entirely new complexion. Brilliant reds and yellows stand out against large looming forces of black and deep Prussian blue. 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." (Rudolf von Leyden, Raza, Bombay: Sadanga Publications, 1959, p. 19).

Raza moved to France in 1950 and began studying at the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris the following year. Having internalised the formal art training there, he travelled through the countryside, embarking on a journey to understand the unique structural language of French artist Paul Cezanne, as advised by renowned photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson, when they had met in Srinagar some years earlier. Raza found a new freedom in both subject matter and medium with this move. "The gouache technique in tempera was to give way to impasto in oils. The change of medium and manner were not merely technical but signified a fundamental change of attitude. 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. The triumphant handling of paint, this living in paint can only be understood as an act of love." (Rudolf von Leyden, p. 19)

It is this intensity of emotion which creates dynamism in the present lot. "Raza started his painter's life as a painter of colourful looser land and cityscapes, fluid in movement and with a feeling for the spirit of the place. Nature was observed and rendered with the intuition of a passionate lover... nature was experienced in an imaginary space of the artist's creation. In these imaginary "naturescapes", the spectacles of nature burst upon us in dramatic force, seasons and moods, night and day, light and darkness, storms and tranquillity-with glimpses of human habitation, cities, villages, houses, symbols of the human condition in the midst of and part of an ever- changing panorama." (Rudolf von Leyden, "Metamorphosis," Raza, Bombay: Vakils and Sons Limited, 1979) Raza embraces the contours of the landscape with all his senses, creating a symphony of colour and form.

His unique expression during this decade earned Raza the attention of many important critics including Jacques Lassaigne, the Director of the National Museum of Modern Art in Paris. "In 1955 Galerie Lara Vincy proposed to Raza a regular contract of work under which it would acquire his painting in advance on a monthly payment. Raza had in the meantime acquired what the French called 'le sens plastique', 'an understanding of those pictorial elements which were fundamental in painting: problems of colour, space, and their orchestration'." (Ashok Vajpeyi ed., A Life in Art: S H Raza, New Delhi: Art Alive Gallery, 2007, p. 68) The present lot is a masterpiece in which Raza captures the scale, beauty and joy of nature, presenting these elements with an ease of technical skill and mastery over his medium. From this point, Raza would, over the next six decades, redefine the course of Indian Modernism, to become one of the most influential artists of the post-Independence era.

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