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Lot 13

 

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Painted in 1952, two years after S H Raza had moved to Paris, the present lot reflects a brief but significant point in the artist’s career when he was departing from his earlier expressionist style toward a more Cubist approach. During his early years in France, Raza travelled to the southern countryside (where he would later settle down), as well as parts of Spain and Italy. Likely inspired by his two month sojourn in Italy, this work... Painted in 1952, two years after S H Raza had moved to Paris, the present lot reflects a brief but significant point in the artist’s career when he was departing from his earlier expressionist style toward a more Cubist approach. During his early years in France, Raza travelled to the southern countryside (where he would later settle down), as well as parts of Spain and Italy. Likely inspired by his two month sojourn in Italy, this work depicts a scene in Venice, and is a rare and unusual choice for the artist who mainly focussed on the French landscape. Painted in gouache—Raza’s preferred medium at the time—it portrays a picturesque vision of the city with its tightly nested buildings set against the dark canal waters and a night sky, as gondolas float in the foreground. True to his method, Raza deliberately avoids portraying any sign of human life in this work. “They are not “views” as seen from a particular point, but an affirmation of a pictorial truth.” (Jacques Riols, “Indian Artists in Paris: S.H. Raza Develops a New Style,” The Sunday Statesman, 1 November 1953)

Through his travels, Raza was exposed to medieval European art, which he had little chance to study in India. He was particularly influenced by Byzantine painting, Romanesque sculpture, and the pre?Renaissance painters of the Sienese School such as Ambrogio Lorenzetti and Simone Martini. According to critic Rudy von Leyden, they “appealed to him in their austerity which was capable of conveying the most exquisite poetic sensitivity.” (Raza, Bombay: Sadanga Publications, 1959, p. 18)

In works such as the present lot, the artist possibly drew inspiration from the bright colours and spatial structure of Sienese paintings, such as Lorenzetti’s City by the Sea, circa 1340, or Martini’s Guidoriccio da Fogliano at the Siege of Montemassi,1328?30 (see below). The architectural setting, flat perspective and delineated structure also hark back to the fine compositions of Indian 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.” (Von Leyden, p. 18)

Raza’s primary influence, however, both in subject and style during this period, can be traced to the European master Paul Cézanne, whose works he was introduced to by the French photographer Henri Cartier?Bresson. Cartier?Bresson had seen Raza’s work in 1948 and had found it full of "colour and emotion," but observed that it lacked construction. He said to Raza, “...a painting is constructed like a building on a sound base with walls, base, roof, doors, windows and if it does not have these it is fragile. Paintings are in a way similar; you have to construct a painting with a sense of geometry. Remember the name Paul Cézanne, he mastered construction in painting. His paintings are testimony to his sense of structure.” (Quoted in Ranjit Hoskote, Ashok Vajpeyi, Yashodhara Dalmia and Avni Doshi, Vistaar: S H Raza, Mumbai: Art Musings, 2012, p. 138) This meeting with Cartier?Bresson fundamentally changed the direction of Raza’s art.

Raza’s works, including the present lot, demonstrate a synthesis of these medieval and contemporary influences, but in a style entirely his own. “It was in 1952 that I saw the first works of Raza, recently arrived in Paris from India. They were strange and unusual works: timeless landscapes, uninhabited cities detached from the earth, bathed in cold light. Schematized houses were linked one to another in an endless, sinuous chain... Through an original separation of light and shadow, Raza expressed the contrast of day and of night which haunted him ceaselessly.” (Jacques Lassaigne, Art et Architecture Actuels, No. 79, Paris: Cimaise, 1967)

Raza carried his childhood fascination with the lush forests of Madhya Pradesh, where he grew up, and his love of nature with him to Europe, which presented itself as a new opportunity for exploration and experimentation. He acquired a new understanding of the relationship between form, colour and construction. This type of landscape, which focused on methodical and detailed structure, was new for the artist. “Over these works Raza had taken infinite pains. Each shape was carefully related to another, weighed, balanced till it had found its place in the composition which would appear unshakeable. Colour had undergone the most intricate studies to be able to express the finest overtones of a poetic situation.

Because that is what these paintings really are: poetic situations. They were as austere and sensitive as the landscape backgrounds in the paintings of the Sienese primitives with their garlands of houses, walls and towers strung across the horizon.” (Von Leyden, p. 18)

The present lot was painted the same year in which Raza exhibited for the first time in Paris, at a group show with fellow artists F N Souza and Akbar Padamsee at Galerie Saint?Placide. The success of this exhibition was followed by several others, and Raza was widely lauded in the French press during this period in the early 1950s.

With its careful precision and charming composition, works like Venice play an important role in marking the plot points which would eventually lead to Raza’s success as one of India’s earliest Modernists.

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