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Lot 27

 

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S.H. Raza moved to Paris in 1950 on a grant from the French Government to study painting at the Ecole de Beaux-Arts there. In 1952, his work was featured in several group shows including 'Regards sur la Peinture Indienne' at the Centre Latin Paris, and alongside his compatriots Akbar Padamsee and F.N. Souza at Galerie Saint Placide and Galerie Raymond Creuze. This was an important period in Raza's development as a painter, during which he moved... S.H. Raza moved to Paris in 1950 on a grant from the French Government to study painting at the Ecole de Beaux-Arts there. In 1952, his work was featured in several group shows including 'Regards sur la Peinture Indienne' at the Centre Latin Paris, and alongside his compatriots Akbar Padamsee and F.N. Souza at Galerie Saint Placide and Galerie Raymond Creuze. This was an important period in Raza's development as a painter, during which he moved from being passive to the work of European artists, to absorbing and using these influences towards his own ends.

In a 1958 exhibition catalogue for his first solo show with Galerie Lara Vincy, Jacques Lassaigne, then Director of the Museum of Modern Art in Paris, discussed Raza's works, noting, "…when a young painter from abroad exhibits for the first time in Paris, his works likely as not, will betray a streak of exoticism inseparable from an exotic background. Yet there was nothing of this in the pictures by Raza which we saw in 1952 and 1953 - strange, unaccountable works, unamenable to any traditional type of art. Timeless landscapes with no accommodation for man; uninhabited, uninhabitable cities, located beyond the confines of earth, bathed in cold light; schematic houses stretching away in a sinuous line, suspended in the sky beneath a black sun. On one and the same canvas the painter displayed opposing aspects of his theme. An unexpected distribution of lights and shadows compelled the spectator to a full awareness of the object in all its dimensions" (as quoted in Rudolf Von Leyden, Raza, Sadanga Publications, Mumbai, 1959, p. 18).

During this period the artist travelled widely across France and was mesmerized by its rustic countryside and the elegance of its rural towns and cities. One of the citadels he visited and was moved to capture in paint was Carcassonne. The present lot is the first of three known works that the artist painted after his first visit to this fortified French town in the southern region of Languedoc-Roussillon. Perched on top of a hill, the history and construction of Carcassonne can be traced as far back as 100 BC, when it was first fortified by the Romans, then added to by the Visigoths and the Cathars, and finally, in the mid-1800s, restored to its original glory by the French architect Eugene Viollet-le-Duc.

Here, Raza offers a tightly composed landscape seen over a long, dark roof in the foreground, and flattened against the calm, gray-blue sky beyond it. This compact townscape offers a view of both the turrets and barbicans of Carcassonne's upper fortress, now listed as one of UNESCO's World Heritage Sites, as well as of the surrounding houses of the lower city, known as ville basse, highlighting the hierarchal, feudal construction of the town.

While Raza's early watercolour landscapes, executed in the 1940s, had a fluid feel and betrayed the influence of artists like Oskar Kokoschka, paintings like Carcassonne display a very different handling of composition and structure, as well as a change of medium. This change was largely influenced by a 1948 meeting with Henri Cartier-Bresson, the famous French photographer who was in India at the time, and who admired Raza's work but commented on its lack of formal structure.

The art critic and close supporter of Raza, Rudolph von Leyden, described this transformation, saying, "There begun 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. Raza has entered a 'classic' period…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 this is what these paintings really are: poetic situations. They were as austere and sensitive as the landscape backgrounds in the paintings of the Sienese primitives with their garlands of houses, walls and towers strung across the horizon" (Ibid.).

Yashodhara Dalmia adds to von Leyden's analysis, noting that while "These works seem to draw from the new formalism acquired by his greater acquaintance with the Ecole de Paris…It has to be said that the works were not mere formal exercises; they inhabited a personal space that was undergoing a metamorphosis, in a no man's land, uprooted from the earth, searching for meaning. The savage intensity of the colours, the smouldering oranges against charred blacks speak of passionate lived experiences" (The Making of Modern Indian Art: The Progressives, Oxford University Press, New Delhi, 2001, p. 149, 150).

Another aspect of Raza's oeuvre highlighted by paintings like the present lot is the constant influence that classical Indian art forms have had on his work, particularly miniature painting. Like fellow members of the Progressive Artists' Group, M.F. Husain and F.N. Souza, Raza frequently turned to his native land and its traditions, combining them with the modern artistic vocabulary of the 1950s to create true and original works of art. In Carcassonne, Raza's view is unique, incorporating ideas from both medieval European painters and 17th century Indian miniaturists, particularly in the handling of space and perspective.

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