Important Notice

“My work is my own inner experience and involvement with the mysteries of nature and form which is expressed in colour, line, space and light.” - S H RAZA

S H Raza sailed for France in 1950, thus beginning a journey that would influence his practice for decades. His artistic evolution is considered to be one of the most fluid and versatile ones in modern Indian art. Each phase in his oeuvre signified not only a technical change in... “My work is my own inner experience and involvement with the mysteries of nature and form which is expressed in colour, line, space and light.” - S H RAZA

S H Raza sailed for France in 1950, thus beginning a journey that would influence his practice for decades. His artistic evolution is considered to be one of the most fluid and versatile ones in modern Indian art. Each phase in his oeuvre signified not only a technical change in style and medium, but also a significant change in attitude.

His journey began with his studies at the École Nationale des Beaux-Arts in Paris on a French government scholarship in 1951. The first few years in France, though difficult, were formative. “He came in contact for the first time with a world in which art was taken entirely seriously and definitely formed part of the life which surrounded it.” (Rudolf von Leyden, Raza, Bombay: Sadanga Publications, 1959, p. 4)

This was also a period of exploration for Raza, who travelled across France, as well as to Italy and Spain. “Landscapes, people – other artists thrilled him as much as the works of art of many ages and nations that he met face to face for the first time.” (von Leyden, p. 18) This exposure combined with his formal education led him to understand and appreciate Renaissance and European art, and the use of light, colour, and structure, which in turn influenced his work at the time.

Raza’s artistic methods underwent another evolution in the early 1960s when he moved from precisely structured landscapes to unrestrained, gestural ones with colour and texture as the primary focus. While they continued to be inspired by his travels, they were, at the same time, beginning to recall his Indian roots and associations. This evolving style of painting, along with the increased use of oils instead of gouache and tempera, “signified a fundamental change of attitude. The scholar, who had measured and calculated, burst through the confines of a limited understanding of colour and space – created-by-colour into a sphere of full realisation.” (von Leyden, p. 19)

Influenced by European expressionist and abstract movements, the careful construction and objectivity of the previous decade began to wane, leaving room for a new kind of emotional subjectivity. “He began to submit observed reality to his own structural discipline, painting a series of geometric houses with mathematical precisions... The landscapes are imaginary and timeless, asserting Raza’s preference for a more conceptual vision of nature.” (Amrita Jhaveri, A Guide to 101 Modern and Contemporary Indian Artists, Mumbai: India Book House, 2005, p. 74)

Painted in 1965, Congo represents this transformative period in Raza’s practice. Primarily relying on colour to convey a lyrical vision of the space, along with the mood and emotions it evoked in the artist, the present lot, and other gestural paintings from this period, represented the location through simple brushstrokes that loosely imitated flickers of light and natural forms. “His forms developed in their contrast, light enhanced by neighboring opacity. Raza always painted an imaginary world, traversed by tragic intensities, with his energies concentrated at the points where his coloured planes overlapped.” (Jacques Lassaigne, Raza, Paris: Cimaise Art et Architecture Actuals, 1967, p. 41)

The evolution in Raza’s oeuvre represented in t this painting followed his visit to the USA in 1962, where he spent several months as a lecturer at the University of California, Berkeley, and subsequently as a Rockefeller Foundation Fellow. Inspired by the creativity, freedom, and visual impact of the work of American Abstract Expressionists such as Hans Hofmann, Jackson Pollock, and Mark Rothko whose works he encountered while he was in the USA, Raza began to paint with a new fluidity, imparting a lyrical, dynamic energy to his work.

He found himself turning away from mimetic representation to describe the more intangible aspects of a landscape on his canvases. Thus, in the mid-1960s and early ‘70s, Raza deftly manipulated colour and light to focus on the emotion a scene evoked rather than its physical attributes. “As a painter, I have to realise the ideas, the moods, the sentiments, in a visual language of form and colour. A painting has to be seen, and to be felt. It has to be felt – through all the senses.” (Artist quoted in Geeti Sen, Bindu: Space and Time in Raza’s Vision, New Delhi: Media Transasia Ltd., 1997, p. 148)

Painted three years after his teaching stint at Berkeley, Hofmann’s influence is particularly evident in the present lot, as seen in the swirling strokes and vivid hues and movement. Raza uses subtly graded tones of green and blue, along with blacks and whites, to represent the jungle of Congo with its lush trees and the river. A few breaks in the dense foliage (represented by the green) have allowed some light to emerge, thereby drawing the viewer’s eye from the shadowy blues to focus on the work as a whole. Raza’s sensual enjoyment of physical detail and an almost tacit sense of painterliness establishes this work as one that moves beyond the merely representational into the realm of the spiritual.

The brushwork emphasises the use of colour and texture as the primary driving forces in the work. According to critic Ashok Vajpeyi, colours were shed of their formal purpose, but instead were laden with emotionally charged resonance, often depicting seasons or moods. It is likely that the colour palette in Congo emerges from the depths of Raza’s childhood memories spent in the dense forests of Madhya Pradesh, and the fear and fascination associated with them. “Nights in the forests were hallucinating... Daybreak brought back a sentiment of security and well-being... Even today I find that these two aspects of my life dominate me and are an integral part of my paintings.” (Artist quoted in Ashok Vajpeyi ed., A Life in Art: S H Raza, New Delhi: Art Alive Gallery, 2007, p. 197)

Paintings from this period are often named for the places they were inspired by where “...the outlines of any cognizant forms have virtually disappeared – you may catch here and there a glimpse of a figure, the shimmer of leaves on a tree or the vague markings of human habitation. But it is the mood which prevails, or to put it in his own terms, ‘a certain climate of experience’. It is the brushstroke which assumes importance, to create this mood... The image becomes thus enshrined as an icon, as sacred geography.” (Sen, pp. 76, 98)

The present lot is a wonderful marker of the evolution Raza’s art underwent during the decade in which Congo was painted and is a fine example of the artist’s intuitive exploration of colour relationships and the sense of balance that pervades his oeuvre, cementing his place as one of the most influential artists of the post-Independence era. Talking about Raza’s art from this period, French art critic Jacques Lassaigne stated, “His painting has become fluid, light, calm. His fragmented stroke is extending itself gradually across the surface, and is now being organized along unexpected planes… The accords are becoming more precious, the impalpable blends are giving way to colliding affirmations. And the work is finding, occasionally at the heart of strange concretions, a center of subtle gravity. For there is no doubt that there is a solidity, a certainty in these forms, a quasi-mineral aspect, a presence which faces up victoriously to the wealth of imagination.” (Lassaigne, p. 41)

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