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Lot 32

 

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S H Raza painted the present lot at a time when he was living in France as an Indian expatriate. His visual language underwent a significant transition during these years. "By the time I left for Paris I was so taken up with the Indian style and the Indian concepts that for two years I worked in the Indian style: landscapes, housescapes, earthscapes re-constructed." (Artist quoted in Ashok Vajpeyi ed., A Life in Art: S H Raza, New Delhi:... S H Raza painted the present lot at a time when he was living in France as an Indian expatriate. His visual language underwent a significant transition during these years. "By the time I left for Paris I was so taken up with the Indian style and the Indian concepts that for two years I worked in the Indian style: landscapes, housescapes, earthscapes re-constructed." (Artist quoted in Ashok Vajpeyi ed., A Life in Art: S H Raza, New Delhi: Art Alive Gallery, 2007, p. 59)

Raza's transformation in this decade was shaped by "the highly evocative ambience of Paris, embodied in its various museums, art galleries, art-events and new friends..." (Vajpeyi, p. 54) He was set on finding and refining his unique visual language. "A certain ripening of knowledge and aesthetic sensibility and a maturing of his style were taking place." (Vajpeyi, p. 66) He took on oil painting, creating works that were markedly different from his figurative watercolours of the forties - landscapes that are "well-composed, painstakingly constructed, colours used very poetically and evoked a unique mood of their own." (Vajpeyi, p. 64) These works serve as studies of light and darkness with intensely contrasting swatches of dark and bright colours.

Woman with a Tree was painted in 1953, a year during which Raza spent time travelling in France with his contemporaries and friends F N Souza and Akbar Padamsee. They had been part of his close circle of friends in Paris during the early 1950s, along with scholars and prominent figures from the Indian expatriate community. "They would meet for discussions and talk heatedly on French art in his Bhownagary basement flat, having a meal of 'potatoes and ordinary red wine'." (Yashodhara Dalmia, "Journeys with the Black Sun," The Making of Modern Indian Art: The Progressives, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2001, p. 150) Raza and his contemporaries drew a lot of inspiration from each other during this time, and their works from this period reflect a certain cross-fertilisation of influences, as evident in the present lot.

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