Important Notice

The present lot continues S H Raza's preoccupation with the French landscape. Titled Moulin (Windmill), it depicts his semiabstracted representation of his adopted country, and was perhaps a gift to his friend and noteworthy collector Bal Chhabda.

Between 1954 and 1965, Raza followed, literally, in the footsteps of the French artist Paul Cezanne - whose work and composition had been brought to his attention a few years earlier... The present lot continues S H Raza's preoccupation with the French landscape. Titled Moulin (Windmill), it depicts his semiabstracted representation of his adopted country, and was perhaps a gift to his friend and noteworthy collector Bal Chhabda.

Between 1954 and 1965, Raza followed, literally, in the footsteps of the French artist Paul Cezanne - whose work and composition had been brought to his attention a few years earlier by acclaimed photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson. "[Raza] 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. 151152)

Having spent a decade in France, Raza's artistic methods had evolved by 1960 - when the present lot was painted - from precisely structured landscapes to unrestrained, gestural ones with colour and texture as the primary focus. While they continued to be inspired by his travels through rural France, they were, at the same time, beginning to recall his Indian roots and associations. Both the change in medium - Raza had started to paint with oils instead of gouache and tempera - as well as the evolving style of his painting "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." (Rudolf von Leyden, Raza, Bombay: Sadanga Publications, 1959, p. 19)

The careful construction and objectivity of the previous decade had now begun to wane, leaving room for a new kind of emotional subjectivity. "The colour-harmony achieved on the canvas was emblematic of an inner search for harmony. The emotive element in Raza's art was an Indian legacy which he never moved away from and which, once again, qualified his kind of modernism. Though his full Indian rootedness was to appear much later in his work, one could discern in his work at this stage that he still painted like an Indian in the Parisian school." (Ashok Vajpeyi ed., A Life in Art: S H Raza, New Delhi: Art Alive Gallery, 2007, p. 76)

According to Raza, "There is a danger in too great obsession with image as there is danger in making colour orchestration the sole purpose of painting. The form analysis and the evolution of pictorial thought from Cezanne to de Stael is a logical growth. Following the direction, one enters the domain where colour is energy with innumerable situations and possibilities." (Artist quoted in Von Leyden, p. 19) The present lot is a fine example of Raza's intuitive exploration of colour relationships and the sense of balance that pervades his oeuvre, cementing his place as one of the most influential artists of the post-Independence era.

BAL CHHABDA (1923 - 2013)

Bal Chhabda's role as a patron to the artists-and as an artist himself-was a seminal one in the history of modern Indian art. A key figure among the art circles from the 1950s onwards, Chhabda was a close friend of the Progressive Artists' Group and instrumental in promoting and contributing to their success. "The history remembers and reminisces those with success, the pioneers; the steps are not counted, just trod upon... Bal Chhabda, the loyal friend Husain mentions, is the significant piece of the jigsaw called PAG." (Snehal Tambulwadikar, "The Unspoken Histories and Fragment: Bal Chhabda," art news & views, online)

Born in pre-Partition Punjab in 1923, Chhabda was an artist, gallerist, collector, and in his early days, even a filmmaker. After a brief stint working in the family business of film distribution in Ahmedabad, Chhabda embarked on a year-long explorative journey to Hollywood in 1947 and made a film titled Do Raha in 1952. Although it was commercially unsuccessful, Chhabda formed a friendship with the modernist M F Husain through it and became immersed in the art world, when his attempt to secure funds for his second film failed.

In the late 1950s, Husain took him to the Bhulabhai Desai Memorial Institute in Mumbai, which was then the nexus for budding artists, musicians and theatre practitioners. Through the erstwhile PAG artist, he met the theatre doyen Ebrahim Alkazi and artists Tyeb Mehta, S H Raza, Krishen Khanna, Ram Kumar and V S Gaitonde, who lived and assembled at the Institute. It was Husain and Gaitonde's encouragement that prompted Chhabda to try his hand at painting.

At the time, there were no contemporary art spaces in Mumbai, and to answer this need, Chhabda founded Gallery 59 in 1959-named after the year it was formed-at the ground floor of the Institute. Although it was short-lived, Gallery 59 showcased important works of many young artists, such as Akbar Padamsee's seminal solo show Grey Works, which included the monumental painting Greek Landscape, and was showered with rave reviews by leading critics.

Within a year of its opening, Chhabda shut down the gallery after differences with the Institute's manager, but he remained a close patron and friend to artists, amassing a huge collection of their works throughout his lifetime. Lots 9 and 10 were a part of his collection.

As unequivocally supportive as he was of his fellow artists, Chhabda was just as shy about his own art. Although he had perhaps only three solo shows in his entire artistic career, he participated in several prestigious exhibitions in India and internationally. In 1961, he received the Governor's award at the Tokyo Biennale-an honour he steadfastly downplayed. In 1965, he received the Lalit Kala Akademi Award, followed by a J D Rockefeller III Fellowship to travel and work in the US. Four years later, his work was selected for the show Contemporary Art: A Dialogue between the East and West, which included the likes of Robert Rauschenberg, Andy Warhol, Gerhard Richter and Jackson Pollock, and was held at the Musem of Modern Art in Tokyo. Even the establishment of the Jehangir Nicholson Gallery of Modern Art, which was possible due to Jehangir Nicholson donating a part of his collection to the National Centre for the Performing Arts, is partially credited to Bal Chhabda.

Heartbroken after the death of artists and close friends Tyeb Mehta in 2009 and M F Husain in 2011, Chhabda was said to have become a recluse. He passed away in 2013. His contribution to the development of Indian art, whether directly or indirectly, and the growth of the art scene in Mumbai, was pivotal to its success, and are enduring reminders of his legacy.

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