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Lot 21

 

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The time Raza spent as an apprentice at the École de Paris deeply enriched the artistic vocabulary that he began to develop in India in the late 1940s. Using what he learnt about style and technique as a means rather than an end, the young artist communicated a unique vision of the terrain he painted in the late 1950s. His command over colour and medium had become masterful, and as formal structure receded, these elements took a leading role in... The time Raza spent as an apprentice at the École de Paris deeply enriched the artistic vocabulary that he began to develop in India in the late 1940s. Using what he learnt about style and technique as a means rather than an end, the young artist communicated a unique vision of the terrain he painted in the late 1950s. His command over colour and medium had become masterful, and as formal structure receded, these elements took a leading role in Raza's landscapes of the period. "The image of Raza's paintings of his recent period is difficult to define. His paintings still show houses, spires, trees and other elements of landscape emerging out of colour, which is their true element. The 'subject' is irrelevant but the 'image' persists. Perhaps it was Jacques Lassaigne who found the best description of this image as a world amid the contending powers of darkness and light" (Rudolf Von Leyden, Raza, Sadanga Publications, Mumbai, 1959, p. 19).

These Expressionist renderings of the French countryside and its provincial towns seem almost sculpted out of thick impasto in oil. In the present lot, for example, a quiet church and small group of houses spills across a hillside, dividing the inky blue sky from the dense expanse of shrubbery bursting with colour below it. Unusual in its verticality and scale, this 1959 landscape was one of the paintings that the Romanian émigré gallerist Simon Dresdnere sourced from Raza's Paris dealer Lara Vincy for his gallery in Montreal. Dresdnere's association with Vincy in the late 1950s and early 60s played a critical role in extending Raza's audience in North America, placing several important works by the artist, including the present lot, in prestigious private collections across Canada and the United States.

Speaking about Raza's work in the late 1950s, Jacques Lassaigne, then director of the Museum of Modern Art in Paris, says, "…in his sustained efforts to deepen and revitalize his vision Raza has never deviated from the line of research he first charted out for himself. The seeming difference between his canvases of today and his gouaches of yesterday corresponds to the transition from one technique, in which lightness of touch is everything, to another, richer and more complex, which calls for all the resources at the artist's command…Pure forms take shape no longer in the void, but in revelatory contrast with their surroundings, in light that exults, doubly bright, against the opacity that threatens it" (as quoted in Ashok Vajpeyi, A Life in Art: S. H. Raza, Art Alive Gallery, New Delhi, 2007, p. 73).

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