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Lot 46

 

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“In my opinion colour in Rajasthan represents ecstasy. The Jain and Rajput miniatures have always been a source of inspiration for me.” - S H RAZA

Landscapes have been an important part of S H Raza’s oeuvre from the very beginning of his career. While the central Indian landscape of his childhood remained a lasting influence on him, he moved his focus to the French countryside for a decade following his move to France in 1950. It... “In my opinion colour in Rajasthan represents ecstasy. The Jain and Rajput miniatures have always been a source of inspiration for me.” - S H RAZA

Landscapes have been an important part of S H Raza’s oeuvre from the very beginning of his career. While the central Indian landscape of his childhood remained a lasting influence on him, he moved his focus to the French countryside for a decade following his move to France in 1950. It was these French landscapes with which he honed his sense of pictorial construction influenced by European greats like French Post- Impressionist Paul Cézanne.

In 1959, he and his wife, fellow artist and student Janine Mongillat, visited India together as newlyweds. This was Raza’s first visit back to India after nine long years of assimilation into French society. According to critic Ashok Vajpeyi, “These visits were not only reinvigorating for Raza, they also started impacting his work. He began to feel that he had to aesthetically assert and articulate his irrepressible Indian identity. India at any time is a riot of colours and hues.” S H Raza’s visits to India, which became more frequent after this point, eventually became the primary source of inspiration for his work. “Raza sought both a lot of inspiration from the colourful spectacles he saw and imbibed and an endorsement, as it were, of his colourful palette.” (Ashok Vajpeyi, A Life in Art: S H Raza, New Delhi: Art Alive Gallery, 2007, p. 98)

This present lot was made after the 1959 visit to India when Raza and Mongillat toured Rajasthan and Saurashtra in addition to visiting his native Madhya Pradesh. The work, a dark canvas punctuated with shocks of brilliant oranges and reds reminiscent of the colours of the desert, is likely one of the earliest in a series of landscapes of Rajasthan by Raza spanning decades. Art critic Geeti Sen states that the colours of the Rajasthani landscape are crucial to Raza’s understanding of the Indian palette. “Rajasthan becomes a metaphor for the colours of India: of vibrant greens and vermilion and ochres, as also blacks. Rajasthan is the mapping of metaphorical space in the mind which is then enclosed with a broad border in bold vermillion-as also happens to be the case in Rajput paintings from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.” (Geeti Sen, Bindu: Space and Time in Raza’s Vision, New Delhi: Media Transasia India Limited, 1997, p. 98)

While the Rajasthan series gives obvious expression to the influence Rajput and Jain miniatures had on Raza’s sense of construction, their impact on his style could already be felt in earlier works. Art critic Rudolf von Leyden who followed Raza’s career very closely noted of his works from the late 1950s that they are “...clearly related to the Indian tradition of painting especially of the Rajasthan, Mewar and Deccan schools. They remind one of the architectural settings and backgrounds of the late medieval miniature paintings with the one difference that, while the miniatures are essentially illustrative, Raza’s paintings create an image. They do not tell a story, they exist…his colors take on an entirely new complexion. Brilliant reds and yellows stand out against large looming forces of black and deep Prussian blue. Shapes dissolve in seas of colors which are by no means unorganized and fluid but seem to move and evolve within the space of the painting.” (Rudolf von Leyden, Raza, Bombay: Sadanga Publications, 1959, p. 18-19)

The present lot is a transitional work made a year before exposure to the American Abstract Expressionists encouraged Raza to move entirely to the gestural. The work stands as testament to his move from Cézanne’s sense of perfect construction through lines to relying equally on colour to create a form. “Much like Ram Kumar in distant Delhi, Raza’s landscapes began to dissolve of things recognisable. The fields and buildings were replaced by an assured construction of ideas that imagined forms. It was a period in which Raza took ownership of the colour black, imbuing it with as much feeling as with meaning. He would break that dark field with a sudden, surprising burst of colour-white, yellow, green, but often red.” (Kishore Singh, “Ideas and Claims on Identity”, Ashok Vajpeyi ed., Yet Again: Nine New Essays on Raza, Kolkata: Akar Prakar in association with Mapin Publishing, 2015, p. 74)

The late 50s and early 60s are an important turning point in Raza’s career, one where he begins to synthesise his disparate influences -Western modernism and conception of picture space with a bold Indian palette-with increasing confidence and frequency to create a singular oeuvre. In the words of Sen, “What distinguishes Raza’s canvases is his choice of colours, and his symbiosis of forms. This palette returns us once more to the Indian sensibility, and it establishes an immediate distance from other forms of gestural expressionism. Having imbibed the modernism of Europe, he brings to this his underpinnings of another realm of colour sensation.” (Sen, p. 79)

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