Important Notice

“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.” - S H RAZA

The landscape of France, S H Raza’s adopted home, played a crucial role in shaping his artistic evolution, particularly through the 1950s and 1960s. Between 1954 and 1965, he followed in the footsteps of Cézanne whose... “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.” - S H RAZA

The landscape of France, S H Raza’s adopted home, played a crucial role in shaping his artistic evolution, particularly through the 1950s and 1960s. Between 1954 and 1965, he followed in the footsteps of Cézanne whose structural approach he had been encouraged to study by renowned photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson. He “moved out to the countryside; to Cézanne’s Provence... and to the Maritime Alps where the French landscape with its trees, mountains, villages, and churches became his staple diet.” (Yashodhara Dalmia, “Journeys With the Black Sun,” The Making of Modern Indian Art, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2001, pp. 151-152) Many of his works from this period bear titles that reflect his deep engagement with nature, often referencing specific places, seasons, or times of day.

Painted in 1965, the present lot exemplifies a pivotal phase in Raza’s oeuvre where his brushwork grew increasingly expressive, and colour and texture took precedence over formal construction. This change was precipitated by a visit to the United States a few years earlier in 1962 where he spent a summer teaching at the University of California, Berkeley, and absorbed the influence of Abstract Expressionists such Willem de Kooning, Sam Francis, Hans Hoffman, and Mark Rothko. As critic Geeti Sen notes, he began to communicate his experience of nature and an “inner rhythm” rather than a realistic representation or even the imagined landscapes of his early gouaches. (Geeti Sen, “La Forge: The Furnace”, Bindu: Space and Time in Raza’s Vision, New Delhi: Media Transasia Limited, 1997, p. 79) Reflecting on this shift, Raza once wrote, “I wanted to aim at something more than mere technical command. I realised that my eyes were focussed outwards, and there was an imperative need to look within myself. Thus began a transformation in my vision, and in my work. Thereafter, visual reality, the aim to construct a “tangible” world, receded. In its place there was a preoccupation with evoking the essence, the mood of places and of people. Day and night, summer and winter, joy and anguish-these elementary experiences that are felt rather than seen, became my subjects. They were expressed through emotive colours and forms which became increasingly more gestural.” (Artist quoted in Sen, p. 59)

In paintings from this period, such as the present lot, the pictorial space is less structured, focussing on the interplay of light and colour in nature. Raza imbues the canvas with a sense of movement through dynamic strokes of white, accented with yellow and brown. Though abstract, these forms bring to mind a cascading waterfall-an image reinforced by the title of the work. Raza imbues the canvas with a sense of movement through dynamic strokes of white, accented with yellow and brown. Though abstract, these forms bring to mind the image of a cascading waterfall-an image reinforced by the title of the work. By combining expressive brushwork with a deep black background, the artist captures the mood and atmosphere of a landscape at night. Devoid of specific identifying features, the setting could be interpreted as the French countryside or, perhaps, a memory of the Narmada River and the dense forests at nightfall in Mandla, Madhya Pradesh, where he spent his childhood. He once recalled, “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 Yashodhara Dalmia, “The Subliminal World of Raza”, Ashok Vajpeyi ed., A Life in Art: S H Raza, New Delhi: Art Alive Gallery, 2007, pp. 197–198)

Speaking of Raza’s stylistic transformation during this period, Geeti Sen comments, “Notably the outlines of any cognizant forms have virtually all disappeared- you may catch here and there the 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’.”(Sen, p. 76)

Read More
Artist Profile
Other works of this artist in: this auction  |  entire site