Important Notice

Lot 4

 

Quick Zoom

Once he arrived in France in 1950, Raza’s body of work underwent several dramatic shifts. Joining the Ecole de Paris and finally encountering the work of artists like Cezanne and Van Gogh in person, he began to experiment with formal devices like structure and also altered his palette. Speaking of the artist’s work from the period, Jacques Lassaigne, then Director of the Museum of Modern Art, Paris, noted, “There began to appear now out of his... Once he arrived in France in 1950, Raza’s body of work underwent several dramatic shifts. Joining the Ecole de Paris and finally encountering the work of artists like Cezanne and Van Gogh in person, he began to experiment with formal devices like structure and also altered his palette. Speaking of the artist’s work from the period, Jacques Lassaigne, then Director of the Museum of Modern Art, Paris, noted, “There began to appear now out of his studio, after long and arduous work, a new type of landscape. Stylized houses, towers, spires meticulously assembled in paintings where they lived their own mysterious life. They did not seem to belong to any age of man…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” (as quoted in Rudolf Von Leyden, Raza, Sadanga Publications, 1959, p. 18).

The present lot, an Italian landscape painted after a visit to the country in the early 1950s, is representative of this transitional period in Raza’s oeuvre. Here, the artist’s experiments with the concepts of construction and orchestration are clearly visible in his use of the houses and churches he encountered in rural Italy as block-like elements of construction. Viewed from what seems to be an aerial perspective, the orange and blue structures, some with towers and spires, are carefully balanced and related to each other, both in terms of palette and placement, forming a tight group.

Lassaigne noted that these paintings “…were as austere and as sensitive as the as the landscape backgrounds in the paintings of the Sienese primitives with their garlands of houses, walls and towers strung across the horizon…The impact made in Paris by these strange paintings by a ‘peintre hindou’ was fairly strong. They did not seem to fit into any ready-made pigeon holes of classified styles, and yet fascinated because of the particular mood of their own. The exquisite painterly qualities of these works were recognized as well as their limitations” (Ibid.).

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