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Lot 30

 

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The present lot is a rare and monumental work created with two separate canvasses titled Jaipur and Jodhpur. Painted in 1976, these paintings of the two Rajasthani cities have an important place in the artist’s oeuvre, representing a shift in style, medium and subject. At the heart of S H Raza’s art is the celebration of nature, which manifests in his early expressionist watercolour landscapes from the 1940s, the Cubist compositions ... The present lot is a rare and monumental work created with two separate canvasses titled Jaipur and Jodhpur. Painted in 1976, these paintings of the two Rajasthani cities have an important place in the artist’s oeuvre, representing a shift in style, medium and subject. At the heart of S H Raza’s art is the celebration of nature, which manifests in his early expressionist watercolour landscapes from the 1940s, the Cubist compositions during his time in Paris, as well as his later abstract works characterised by the fusion of geometric forms with principles of spirituality.

Born in 1922, Raza spent his childhood in the Mandala district of Madhya Pradesh surrounded by dark forests and lush landscapes. This early experience of nature became a lifelong source of inspiration for Raza, and he would revisit these memories on canvas years later. His love of art brought him to Bombay where he enrolled at the Sir J J School of Arts, earning his diploma in 1947. At the same time, he worked at a blockmaker’s design studio in downtown Bombay, which overlooked one of the busiest streets in the city. His watercolour cityscapes from this vantage point attracted the attention of fellow artists F N Souza and M F Husain—with whom he co? founded the Progressive Artists’ Group—and critics such as Rudy von Leyden, Walter Langhammer and Emmanuel Schlesinger—whose presence, patronage and influence was crucial in the burgeoning art world of then Bombay.

In 1948, Raza travelled to Kashmir, a place which impressed him greatly, and inspired him to paint with a renewed passion and intensity. That year was the first turning point in Raza’s life. One of his landscapes of the Kashmir Valley won him the gold medal from the Bombay Arts Society. In the same year, Raza also met the renowned French photographer Henri Cartier?Bresson, who advised him to study the works of Paul Cézanne to understand structure in painting. Raza then travelled to Paris on a government scholarship, and spent the next few years honing his craft at the École de Paris. This move to France ushered in the next phase of Raza’s career.

Inspired by the French landscape and art scene, including the paintings of Cézanne, Raza’s works from the 1950s demonstrate a Cubist approach, informed by a “sense of order and proportion in form and structure.” (Artist quoted in Geeti Sen, Bindu: Space and Time in Raza’s Vision, New Delhi: Media Transasia Ltd., 1997, p. 57) He exhibited in many group and solo shows in Paris, and his works sold and became part of important collections. Raza soon gained widespread recognition in Europe as well as India. He married the artist Janine Mongillat in 1959, and the couple visited India the same year for an exhibition of Raza’s works organised by the artist and gallery owner Bal Chhabda at Gallery 59 in Mumbai. Following this show, Raza returned to India several times, travelling to his native village—which would inspire the bindu motif in later works—as well as other less familiar parts of the country, including Rajasthan, the focus of the present lot. These visits to places new and old ushered in a phase that drew from the emotional content of his journeys. “Raza was getting himself away from the need to paint what he saw, he was drawn more to paint what he recalled... It was not romantic nostalgia but Raza was torn between two worlds: the tumultuous present, the tranquil past. Beauty and fear coming together again as in the beginning of his life.” (Ashok Vajpeyi ed., A Life in Art: S H Raza, New Delhi: Art Alive Gallery, 2007, p. 80)

By this time, in the 1970s, Raza had moved towards a more fluid style. The American Abstract Expressionist movement had taken hold over the Parisian art scene, and Raza saw greater freedom in this particular form of expression. He gradually abandoned all figuration and the carefully constructed compositions of the 1950s, and moved towards the freer forms of gestural abstraction. In his choice of medium, too, he switched from oil to the more versatile acrylic, as seen in the present lot. “Inevitably, freedom is accompanied by remembrance, and for Raza this brought home the hot, burning colours of miniatures from Mewar and Malwa, the searing sensations of his own land. Even as the acrylic medium lends the painting a fluid vibrance, Raza’s tempestuous gestures, the tongues of flame in paintings like Rajasthan, will be immortalised.” (Yashodara Dalmia, “Journeys with the Black Sun,” The Making of Modern Indian Art: The Progressives, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2001, pp. 154?155) Raza’s canvases from this period were emotional essays, full of colour and vibrant movement. “... colours were not being used as merely formal elements

they were emotionally charged. Their movements or consonances on the canvases seemed more and more to be provoked by emotions, reflecting or embodying emotive content. The earlier objectivity, or perhaps the distance started getting replaced or at least modified by an emergent subjectivity – colours started to take the light load of emotions more than ever before.” (Vajpeyi, p. 78)

Raza began to concentrate on a few selective colours, assembled and reassembled to simulate the passion and warmth of India’s tropical climate. At the same time, he turned to the spiritual and metaphysical aspects of nature, and began incorporating these principles into his work. Raza’s compositions became more structured, with geometry, framing and panels separating forms within the canvas, as seen in Jodhpur. In both the paintings which form the present lot, Raza employs a palette of red, green and black—which evoke the warm colours of the Rajasthan landscape—and encloses them with a broad border, a style reminiscent of Jain and Rajput miniature paintings, which were a major source of inspiration for him. According to Geeti Sen, the treatment hints at “figures and the interiors of palaces which you find in Rajput narratives.” (Sen, pp. 102?103) By doing so, Raza captures the essence of the place gesturally, as well as thematically. “Rajasthan becomes a metaphor for the colours of India... Rajasthan is the mapping out of a metaphorical space in the mind... The image becomes thus enshrined as an icon, as sacred geography.” (Sen, p. 98)

The present lot also contains an early version of the bindu, a motif that is now synonymous with Raza’s art. The bindu emerged as a result of Raza’s concern with “pure plastic order” combined with his preoccupation with nature. “Both have converged into a single point and became inseparable; the point, the bindu, symbolises the seed, bearing the potential of all life, in a sense. It is also visible form containing all the essential requisites of line, tone, colour, texture and space. The black space is charged with latent forces aspiring for fulfilment.” (Artist quoted in Sen, p. 134) These two distinct paintings form one cohesive whole, and represents a significant milestone in the artist’s journey of self?discovery, as well as in his artistic path towards becoming one of India’s best known Modernists.

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