Important Notice

Raza's early constructionist phase of the 1950s, when form and colour were his main preoccupations, was influenced by his encounter with photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson whom he met in Srinagar in 1948. Bresson advised Raza to scrutinise structure in the paintings of Paul Cezanne. This prompted him to attend numerous exhibitions and especially regard the works of the artists he had been encouraged to study, while at the Ecole Nationale des... Raza's early constructionist phase of the 1950s, when form and colour were his main preoccupations, was influenced by his encounter with photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson whom he met in Srinagar in 1948. Bresson advised Raza to scrutinise structure in the paintings of Paul Cezanne. This prompted him to attend numerous exhibitions and especially regard the works of the artists he had been encouraged to study, while at the Ecole Nationale des Beaux-Arts in Paris, in 1950. From his recollections, it is evident that his formative ideas on colour and structure emerged from what he observed in these works. Matisse's works were "solidly constructed, where colour prevailed…Cezanne's works over-orchestrated, bringing him 'from an emotional approach to art to reason'; Gauguin 'much more oriental' and Rousseau 'close to oriental aesthetics'" (Ashok Vajpeyi, A Life in Art: S. H. Raza, Art Alive Gallery, New Delhi, 2007, pg.54).

In France, Raza immersed himself entirely in its culture and settings and travelled extensively between 1954 and '65. He went to central France; to Carcassone and to Provence in the south. Unsurprisingly, French landscapes dominated Raza's paintings in this period. He imbibed much of what he observed during his travels into his art.

Writing for Thought in 1959, Richard Bartholomew commented, "Colour is the legend to each of these landscapes, because in each painting the flesh and form of colour are organic to the skeletal structure, we see the anatomy but not the division of the drawing. Therefore, there is no seductive line to give you the sense of the thing. Trees, houses, roads, streams, the undulation of the land, the falling shadows, the perpendicularity, the levelness, the foreground and the horizon all shift and throb with the life of colour, and the scene is not static. There is hardly a patch of colour that is passive" (The Art Critic, Bart, India, 2012, pg. 339). Speaking of his travels, Raza said, "In the course of my own research and my own love for landscapes I travelled around France…The French landscape is extraordinary: the villages seem situated so beautifully in the context of nature" (Saiyed Haider Raza, Ashok Vajpeyi, "Le Sense Plastique", Passion: Life and Art of Raza, Rajkamal Books, New Delhi, 2005, pg. 57).

The making of Terre Jaune coincides with a pivotal moment in Raza's life-he was awarded the prestigious Prix de La Critique award in the same year and received extensive coverage in the press worldwide. Colour continued to be the focus of his works of this phase, and the current work uses colour quite emotively to evoke a springtime scene in southern France. Sunflower fields are a common sight in the south, and the domination of ochre in this work hints at this. The colours seem constructed in careful swatches of thick paint. Houses are sandwiched between neat spaces of saturated ochre and cobalt blue, giving an impression of a French village. The well-structured forms from the earlier works have given way to the houses and earth around them. They conflate in a mass of colour and powerful brushstrokes. In this phase, Raza approaches painting with emotional expressionistic gusto.

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