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Lot 12

 

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"The French landscape is extraordinary: the villages seem situated so beautifully in the context of nature." - S H RAZA

Between 1954 and 1965, Raza travelled extensively through France, including to Carcassone and Provence in the south. His work from this time results from the rich colours and textures of the French landscape, enhanced by a change in both his medium and subject matter. Beginning to paint with oils instead of... "The French landscape is extraordinary: the villages seem situated so beautifully in the context of nature." - S H RAZA

Between 1954 and 1965, Raza travelled extensively through France, including to Carcassone and Provence in the south. His work from this time results from the rich colours and textures of the French landscape, enhanced by a change in both his medium and subject matter. Beginning to paint with oils instead of gouache and tempera, "He moved out to the countryside; to Cezanne's Provence... and to the Maritime Alps where the French landscape with its trees, mountains, villages, and churches became his staple diet." (Yashodhara Dalmia, The Making of Modern Indian Art: The Progressives, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2001, pp. 151, 152)

The present lot was painted in 1956, the same year in which the artist won France's renowned Prix de la Critique award. It is a vibrant example of S H Raza's exploration of the relationship between colour and form, which became his main preoccupation in the 1950s. Writing for Thought in 1959, Richard Bartholomew commented on the orchestration of colour in Raza's work from this period: "Colour is the legend to each of these landscapes, because in each painting the flesh and form of colour are organic to the skeletal structure, we see the anatomy but not the division of the drawing. Therefore, there is no seductive line to give you the sense of the thing. Trees, houses, roads, streams, the undulation of the land, the falling shadows, the perpendicularity, the levelness, the foreground and the horizon all shift and throb with the life of colour, and the scene is not static. There is hardly a patch of colour that is passive." (Rati Bartholomew, Pablo Bartholomew, Carmen Kagal and Rosalyn D'Mello eds., Richard Bartholomew: The Art Critic, New Delhi: BART, 2012, p. 339)

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