Important Notice

The present lot is demonstrative of S H Raza’s preoccupation with French landscapes and architecture during the 1950s and early ‘60s. After moving to France in 1950, Raza spent the majority of his time travelling within the country and soaking up influences and inspiration not only from French artists and art movements, but also its architecture, landscape and nature. As noted by art historian Yashodhara Dalmia, “The landscape with its trees,... The present lot is demonstrative of S H Raza’s preoccupation with French landscapes and architecture during the 1950s and early ‘60s. After moving to France in 1950, Raza spent the majority of his time travelling within the country and soaking up influences and inspiration not only from French artists and art movements, but also its architecture, landscape and nature. As noted by art historian Yashodhara Dalmia, “The 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, p. 152)

While his early works from the ‘50s could be understood as a continuation of his largely-figurative landscapes from the previous decade, his practice showed a radical transformation and a shift towards a fresh abstract language over the course of the ‘60s. Influenced by European expressionist and abstract movements, the careful construction and objectivity of the previous decade began to wane, leaving room for a new kind of emotional subjectivity. “He began to submit observed reality to his own structural discipline, painting a series of geometric houses with mathematical precisions... The landscapes are imaginary and timeless, asserting Raza’s preference for a more conceptual vision of nature.” (Amrita Jhaveri, A Guide to 101 Modern and Contemporary Indian Artists, Mumbai: India Book House, 2005, p. 74)

As one can notice in Church, after more than a decade of living in Europe, Raza’s artistic methods distinctly embraced unrestrained, gestural compositions where colours and textures posed as the primary focus. Although his paintings continued to be influenced by French landscapes, they began reflecting colours and emotions that were rooted in his memories of India. “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)

Painted in 1962, this oil on canvas also represents Raza’s premature engagement with abstractionism to depict landscapes and nature. In the years that followed, he wholly departed from figuration and recognisable forms, and adopted an absolute geometric abstract idiom to portray the same themes. Regarding his preoccupation and experiments with abstraction in landscapes, art writer Kishore Singh remarks, “Always a painter of landscapes, whether in his early, impressionistic watercolours in Mumbai, the abstract scenes he favoured in Paris in the first three decades of his career there, or in his later Bindu works using geometrical abstraction in which his ode to nature and the five elements was easily read, Raza relied on balance and harmony as key elements that informed his work. His use of an entire canvas over which he built a narrative without emphasising a single point of focus had guided his paintings throughout his career.” (Kishore Singh ed., Masterpieces of Indian Modern Art II, New Delhi: DAG, p. 379)

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