Important Notice

Fellow founders of the Progressive Artists’ Group, Raza, Souza and Padamsee traveled to Paris in the early 1950s to break from both the western academic realism that dominated art education and practices in India, and the overly sentimental artistic practices Bengal School with its stagnant romanticism. They sought, in Paris, artistic idioms to express ‘freedom’, a value they held dear in the wake of Indian independence.

For Raza,... Fellow founders of the Progressive Artists’ Group, Raza, Souza and Padamsee traveled to Paris in the early 1950s to break from both the western academic realism that dominated art education and practices in India, and the overly sentimental artistic practices Bengal School with its stagnant romanticism. They sought, in Paris, artistic idioms to express ‘freedom’, a value they held dear in the wake of Indian independence.

For Raza, the move to Paris brought about a change in both his medium and subject. Beginning to use oils instead of gouache and tempera, “He moved out to the countryside; to Cezanne’s Provence, as a matter of fact, and to the Maritime Alps where the French landscape with its trees, mountains, villages, and churches became his staple diet” (Yashodhara Dalmia, The Making of Modern Indian Art: The Progressives, Oxford University Press, New Delhi, p. 151-152).

Speaking of Raza’s thick impasto landscapes of the mid 1950s, Jacques Lassaigne, then director of the Museum of Modern Art in Paris, noted, “…in his sustained efforts to deepen and revitalize his vision Raza has never deviated from the line of research he first charted out for himself. The seeming difference between his canvases of today and his gouaches of yesterday corresponds to the transition from one technique, in which lightness of touch is everything, to another, richer and more complex, which calls for all the resources at the artist’s command…Pure forms take shapes no longer in the void, but in revelatory contrast with their surroundings, in light that exults, doubly bright, against the opacity that threatens it” (as quoted in Ashok Vajpeyi, A Life in Art: S H. Raza, Art Alive Gallery, New Delhi, 2007, p. 73).

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