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Lot 20

 

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"The French landscape is extraordinary: the villages seem situated so beautifully in the context of nature." - S H RAZA

The vibrant landscape seen in the present lot was painted a decade after S H Raza moved to France, and represents a period when the artist's style was shifting towards the gestural. Influenced by the abstract or non-figurative artistic expression gaining popularity in France at the time, Raza's paintings began... "The French landscape is extraordinary: the villages seem situated so beautifully in the context of nature." - S H RAZA

The vibrant landscape seen in the present lot was painted a decade after S H Raza moved to France, and represents a period when the artist's style was shifting towards the gestural. Influenced by the abstract or non-figurative artistic expression gaining popularity in France at the time, Raza's paintings began to consist "solely of multicoloured fireworks, devoid of any geometrical organisation and always based on themes related to Nature and its elements." Over the next few years, "the importance of bhava emerged, a profound sentiment guiding the forms and investing the entire canvas." (Michael Imbert, Raza: An Introduction to his Painting, Noida: Rainbow Publishers, 2003, p. 39)

Raza sailed for France in 1950, and thus began a journey and adventure that was to influence his practice for decades. In 1951, he began studying at the Ecole Nationale des Beaux-Arts in Paris on a French government scholarship. 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 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. His unique expression led to his art being featured in solo and group exhibitions around the country, and he gained the attention of many important critics including Jacques Lassaigne, the Director of the National Museum of Modern Art in Paris. In 1955, Galerie Lara Vincy offered Raza a contract to acquire his paintings against a monthly payment; and in 1956, he became the first non-French artist to win the renowned Prix de la Critique award, gaining widespread recognition.

During this period, the French landscape was a recurring theme in his work. "So much of exposure to a new and different visual culture could have easily caused a 'turbulent confusion.' However, instead Raza was able to attain a degree of order and a new kind of landscape started dominating his work... well-composed, painstakingly constructed, colours used very poetically and evoked a unique mood of their own. Perhaps the style developed in Bombay was getting refined and expanded in Paris... creating some new and surprising combinations.??? (Ashok Vajpeyi ed., A Life in Art: S H Raza, New Delhi: Art Alive Gallery, 2007, p. 64)

Between 1954 and 1965, Raza followed, literally, in the footsteps of the French artist Paul Cezanne - whose work and composition had been brought to his attention a few years earlier by acclaimed photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson. "[Raza] moved out to the countryside; to Cezanne's Provence... 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, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2001, pp. 151-152)

Having spent a decade in France, Raza's artistic methods had evolved by the early 1960s - when the present lot was painted - 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 through rural France, they were, at the same time, beginning to recall his Indian roots and associations. Both the change in medium - Raza had started to paint with oils instead of gouache and tempera - as well as the evolving style of his painting "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)

The careful construction and objectivity of the previous decade had now begun to wane, leaving room for a new kind of emotional subjectivity. "The colour-harmony achieved on the canvas was emblematic of an inner search for harmony. The emotive element in Raza's art was an Indian legacy which he never moved away from and which, once again, qualified his kind of modernism. Though his full Indian rootedness was to appear much later in his work, one could discern in his work at this stage that he still painted like an Indian in the Parisian school." (Vajpeyi, p. 76) These elements and the influence of India in Raza's art would begin to manifest more strongly in the following decades, as seen in lots 10, 67 and 68.

According to Raza, "There is a danger in too great obsession with image, as there is danger in making colour orchestration the sole purpose of painting. The form analysis and the evolution of pictorial thought from Cezanne to de Stael is a logical growth. Following the direction, one enters the domain where colour is energy with innumerable situations and possibilities." (Artist quoted in Von Leyden, p. 19) The present lot is a fine example of Raza'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.

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