Important Notice

S H Raza sailed to Paris, via Marseilles, in October 1950, on the precipice of jumping into new experiences which would help shape his artistic oeuvre in the years to come. On visiting Cafe Le Dôme, he resonated intensely with a poster on the wall that read “La vie commence demain! (Life begins tomorrow!)” Charged by the living culture in his adopted country of France, Raza began encountering works by Matisse, Van Gogh, Cézanne, and Monet... S H Raza sailed to Paris, via Marseilles, in October 1950, on the precipice of jumping into new experiences which would help shape his artistic oeuvre in the years to come. On visiting Cafe Le Dôme, he resonated intensely with a poster on the wall that read “La vie commence demain! (Life begins tomorrow!)” Charged by the living culture in his adopted country of France, Raza began encountering works by Matisse, Van Gogh, Cézanne, and Monet among others. Raza started painting landscapes pulsating with colour and in an impressionist style, the likes of which he had never painted before. Paris offered a multitude of inspirations and ideas to Raza through various spaces such as museums, exhibitions, theatre, and libraries. He remarked, “France gave me several acquisitions. First of all, “le sens plastique”, by which I mean a certain understanding of the vital elements in painting. Second, a measure of clear thinking and rationality. The third, which follows from this proposition, is a sense of order and proportion in form and structure. Lastly, France has given me a sense of savoir vivre: the ability to perceive and to follow a certain discerning quality in life.” (Artist quoted in Geeti Sen, Bindu: Space and Time in Raza’s Vision, New Delhi: Mapin Publishing Pvt Ltd, 1997, p. 57)

Following his sojourn to France, Raza’s canvases in the 1960s marked an important transition in his stylistic evolution. In 1962, he was invited to the University of California, Berkeley, to teach through the summer. It was here that Raza began to engage and relate to the works of Abstract Expressionist artists such as Hans Hofmann, Sam Francis, and Mark Rothko. “Thereafter, visual reality, the aim to construct a “tangible” world, receded. In its place there was a preoccupation with evoking the essence, the mood of places and of people.” (Artist quoted in Sen, 1997, p. 59) His remodelled vision found solace in exploring the intangible world, that of emotions and moods while referring to nature as a constant inspiration.

Raza’s strokes grew more gestural in the years that followed, with carefully delineated colours to evoke emotive experiences of the place, away from visual reality, as seen in the present lot. Cascade, painted in 1965, marks his pivot from highly structured landscapes to non-figurative expression, with a key focus on colour and texture. Raza’s works from this time are often understood as “....emotional essays in colour. There was passionate fury and restless reaching out to catch the essence of experiences. Via the poetry of his favourite Rilke, Raza was also realising the spiritual and metaphysical reverberations of nature which was fast becoming for him both a source and a complex text to be imaginatively and sensuously comprehended.” (Ashok Vajpeyi ed., A Life in Art: S H Raza, New Delhi: Art Alive Gallery, 2007, p. 78) Composed of dynamic strokes in a predominantly black-and-white palette, Cascade encapsulates the essence of its title– a downward flowing movement- intensified with the contrasting whites and a tinge of yellow and brown hues.

These explorations in colour would gradually lead Raza’s works toward geometry and spirituality, making the present lot an important part of his artistic career where he looked at nature for emotive content. The emotional subjectivity translated through articulate arrangements of colour was revisited time and again throughout his career as also seen in lot 9. Speaking of Raza’s stylistic transformation of this period, Ashok Vajpeyi comments, “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. The earlier objectivity, or perhaps the distance started getting replaced or at least modified by an emergent subjectivity– colours started to carry the light load of emotions more than ever before.” (Vajpeyi ed., 2007, p. 78)

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