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Lot 41

 

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“For many years, my main theme was the French landscape wherein trees and mountains, villages and churches, became important motifs. They served as a pretext to construct; the aim was to ‘build’ a picture.” - S H RAZA

In 1950, S H Raza set sail from Bombay to France with contemporary Akbar Padamsee, arriving first in Marseille and then Paris on 3 October, a move that would prove to be transformative and pivotal to his career as an... “For many years, my main theme was the French landscape wherein trees and mountains, villages and churches, became important motifs. They served as a pretext to construct; the aim was to ‘build’ a picture.” - S H RAZA

In 1950, S H Raza set sail from Bombay to France with contemporary Akbar Padamsee, arriving first in Marseille and then Paris on 3 October, a move that would prove to be transformative and pivotal to his career as an artist. He enrolled at the École Nationale des Beaux-Arts in 1951 and was highly inspired by the evocative ambience of the city where he encountered the works of post-Impressionists Van Gogh and Cézanne and other masters such as Matisse, Rousseau and Gauguin. “Paris offered me museums, exhibitions, libraries, theatre, ballet, films-in short, a living culture!” he said. (Geeti Sen, “La Forge: The Furnace,” Bindu: Space and Time in Raza’s Vision, New Delhi: Media Transasia Limited, 1997, p. 55)

Between 1954 and 1965, Raza followed in the footsteps of Cézanne whose work and composition he had been prompted to pay special attention to a few years earlier by acclaimed photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson. He “moved out to the countryside; to Cézanne’s Provence... and to the Maritime Alps where the French landscape with its trees, mountains, villages, and churches became his staple diet.” (Yashodhara Dalmia, “Journeys With the Black Sun,” The Making of Modern Indian Art, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2001, pp. 151-152)

The present lot was painted in 1960, a decade after the artist moved to France and four years after he became the first non-French artist to be awarded the prestigious Prix de la Critique. The work indicates a significant transitional phase in his oeuvre where he moved from structured landscapes to more gestural ones with colour and texture, rather than forms and lines, as the primary focus, and changed mediums from gouache to oil. “He had come to realise ‘for ever the importance of pictorial space as a living entity which does not just happen but has to be created’.” (Ashok Vajpeyi ed., A Life in Art: S H Raza, New Delhi: Art Alive Gallery, 2007, pp. 64 - 65)

Reviewing Raza’s works in an article announcing the results of the 1956 Prix de la Critique, M T Maugis describes his paintings of French villagescapes as “evoking a strange and tumultuous ambience, which... contributes to the originality of his work.” (Sen, p. 71) The title of the present lot, Eglise, meaning church in French, is the only specific indicator of its subject. One can faintly discern the architectural forms and towering spire, which the artist constructs with a series of jagged impasto strokes and a bold primary colour palette, stylistic devices that would pave the way for his 1970s abstractions. The colours he uses do not just delineate forms but, more importantly, are emotionally charged. Observes writer Kishore Singh, “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,” Yet Again: Nine New Essays on Raza, New Delhi: Akar Prakar in association with The Raza Foundation and Mapin Publishing, 2015, p. 74)

The careful construction and objectivity of the previous decade had now begun to wane, leaving room for a new kind of emotional subjectivity. “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.” (Vajpeyi ed., p. 76)

This path would gradually lead to works of pure abstraction characterised by a heightened focus on lines, forms, and colours. By the mid-1970s and 1980s, Raza would merge the essence of nature and spirituality into precise works that delved into the vast potential of geometric forms, ultimately culminating in the motif he is best known for-the bindu.

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