Important Notice

Lot 79

"When the three artists – Raza, Souza, Padamsee – exhibited together at their first exhibition at Galerie St. Placide in 1952, their work aroused both interest and curiosity." (p. 152, Yashodhara Dalmia, The Making of Modern Indian Art: The Progressives, OUP, 2001)). Fellow founders of the Progressive artists group, they went to Paris struggling to find a new artistic expression - in an effort to break away from both, the European academic... "When the three artists – Raza, Souza, Padamsee – exhibited together at their first exhibition at Galerie St. Placide in 1952, their work aroused both interest and curiosity." (p. 152, Yashodhara Dalmia, The Making of Modern Indian Art: The Progressives, OUP, 2001)). Fellow founders of the Progressive artists group, they went to Paris struggling to find a new artistic expression - in an effort to break away from both, the European academic realism that dominated mainstream art and the sentimentality of the Benal school with its sense of nostalgia.

They sought in Paris, an artistic language that would help them express the new sense of freedom in a creative sphere that the Indian Independence movement had provided in a political and nationalist sphere. Interestingly, while each one was later was to develop his very different pictorial language of modernity, their time together in Paris in the early 1950s saw them at their most artistically connected. Often they would paint the same landscape (usually a church), with a similar palette, but varying viewpoints.

For Raza in particular, his move to Paris in 1950 marked his journey to develop an aesthetic that began imbibing his new surroundings and their influences: "His medium changed from a gouache in tempera to impasto in oil, signifying a major breakthrough with the paint coming into its own. 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. In works like Church (1957), the black steeple and charred roofs burn in their intensity..." (Yashodhara Dalmia, The Making of Modern Indian Art, The Progressives, Oxford University Press, p. 151-152)

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