Important Notice

S H Raza’s affinity to nature can be read in an account fondly recalled by scholar Geeti Sen about her visit to his Gorbio studio in the late 1980s– “The garden was planted with olive trees, bamboo and palms, becoming magical at night with scent of herbs like lavender and mimosa! At this time I shared his delight in nurturing plants and watching them grow. He related the process of growth in nature to artistic creation.” (Geeti Sen, “The Seed... S H Raza’s affinity to nature can be read in an account fondly recalled by scholar Geeti Sen about her visit to his Gorbio studio in the late 1980s– “The garden was planted with olive trees, bamboo and palms, becoming magical at night with scent of herbs like lavender and mimosa! At this time I shared his delight in nurturing plants and watching them grow. He related the process of growth in nature to artistic creation.” (Geeti Sen, “The Seed and The Tree: The Creative Process,” Yet Again: Nine New Essays on Raza, Kolkata: Akar Prakar in collaboration with The Raza Foundation and in association with Mapin Publishing, 2015, p. 43)

S H Raza painted landscapes throughout his oeuvre beginning as early as the 1940s with his watercolours of Bombay. His style underwent a transition, from representational studies to structural compositions upon his move to France in 1950. This transition was accelerated when he encountered and grew to greatly admire the works of Cezanne, Hans Hofmann, and Mark Rothko. Raza recalls, “By the time I left for Paris I was so taken up with the Indian style and the Indian concepts that for two years in Paris I worked in the Indian style: landscapes, housecapes, earthscapes reconstructed ... But then I started studying Cézanne seriously. I went to the museum again and again and tried to understand construction according to Cézanne…” (Yashodhara Dalmia, “The Burning Landscape,” Sayed Haider Raza: The Journey of an Iconic Artist, Noida: HarperCollins, 2021, p. 75)

Raza’s artistic methods underwent another evolution in the mid-1950s, when he moved from precisely structured landscapes to unrestrained, gestural ones with colour and texture as the primary focus. This marked an intense period of exploration, driven towards experiments in the manipulation of light and colour on his canvas. Gleaming tonal variations– flaming reds, lush greens, earthy siennas instilled an emotional vitality into the images. “More importantly, he continued to explore further possibilities of colour, making colour rather than any geometrical design or division, the pivotal element around which his paintings moved. Also, 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.” (Ashok Vajpeyi ed., A Life in Art: S H Raza, New Delhi: Art Alive Gallery, 2007, p. 78)

In Untitled (Red Road), 1960, Raza transposes his impulse to capture the essence and dynamism of nature onto his canvas by employing brilliant colours in deft strokes. This gouache on paper displays a sense of movement from the blue sky, downward, extending into a skillful composition of bright primary colours. The present lot is an exceptional marker of Raza’s zeal to evoke an emotion, an experience that is beyond what can be perceived by the eye. In doing so, Raza was determined to forge his own artistic path while his contemporaries, namely F N Souza, M F Husain, and K H Ara, gave primacy to the human form. “The answer seems to lie elsewhere. Raza’s concern began, and continued, as an exploration of nature in its wider dimensions. He was never concerned with the anecdotal, or for that matter, with the temporality of human life. He was already beginning to be engrossed elsewhere– on the magnitude of life in its universal implications.” (Geeti Sen, Bindu: Space and Time in Raza’s Vision, New Delhi: reverse Mapin Publishing Pvt Ltd, 1997, p. 51)

Read More
Artist Profile
Other works of this artist in: this auction  |  entire site