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Lot 86

 

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An Austrian émigré who came to India in 1933, Rudy von Leyden was one of the European intellectuals credited with bringing a new vitality to Bombay’s art community in the 1940s and 50s. Along with Walter Langhammer and Emmanuel Schlesinger, von Leyden, who served as art critic for the Times of India in the post World War II years, soon made friends with the members of the Progressive Artists’ Group in Bombay including M.F. Husain, F.N. Souza,... An Austrian émigré who came to India in 1933, Rudy von Leyden was one of the European intellectuals credited with bringing a new vitality to Bombay’s art community in the 1940s and 50s. Along with Walter Langhammer and Emmanuel Schlesinger, von Leyden, who served as art critic for the Times of India in the post World War II years, soon made friends with the members of the Progressive Artists’ Group in Bombay including M.F. Husain, F.N. Souza, K.H. Ara and S.H. Raza, becoming a champion of their work and one of their earliest patrons.

It was von Leyden who noticed Raza’s work in a 1943 group show at the Bombay Art Society, and his review of the same that pushed Raza into the limelight for the first time, paving the way for him to take up painting as a full-time career. As Raza recalls, “I showed a couple of works at an exhibition in Bombay, and those two paintings were immediately sold, because they were appreciated by Rudolf von Leyden the art critic who later came to the designers office where I was working to make a living, to pay for my stay in the city. He said, ‘look, I would like to see your work’. I showed him the work and he immediately bought two or three and was buying one or two every month. His partners also bought my paintings, and they all said ‘leave your job, you are wasting your time. You are in the wrong profession, you are a painter.’ I was not very sure of that myself and ultimately I left the job as they were buying regularly. I was showing all over India and it started that way” (as quoted in S.H. Raza in conversation with Susan S. Bean, Saffronart, 2007).

Before he left India for Vienna in the late 1960s, von Leyden had also authored the first monograph on Raza, published as part of the Sadanga Series on Modern and Contemporary Indian Art in 1959.

For more on S.H. Raza’s early bindu paintings, see the catalogue note for Lot 44: Horizon, 1979.

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