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Lot 29

 

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After having spent a decade in France, Raza’s artistic methods had evolved by the early 1960s, from precisely structured landscapes to unrestrained, gestural ones with colour as the primary focus. Works such as the present lot continued to be inspired by his travels through the French countryside, and were, at the same time, beginning to recall his Indian roots and associations.

Unlike the bright canvases from this period, La Nuit... After having spent a decade in France, Raza’s artistic methods had evolved by the early 1960s, from precisely structured landscapes to unrestrained, gestural ones with colour as the primary focus. Works such as the present lot continued to be inspired by his travels through the French countryside, and were, at the same time, beginning to recall his Indian roots and associations.

Unlike the bright canvases from this period, La Nuit is predominantly painted in dark, nearly black shades, with strokes of blue emerging from beneath the layers to evoke the night sky. In the lower half of the painting, a continuous arrangement of white patches and red dabs indicate the presence of houses, likely a village by the French countryside—a recurring subject in Raza’s works at the time. The present lot, however, shows a significant transition in Raza’s style from the previous decade. The careful construction and objectivity seen in works such as Venice, 1952 (lot 13)—which is partly similar in composition and palette—has now begun to wane, leaving room for a new kind of emotional subjectivity.

The brushwork, while haphazard, emphasises the use of colour and texture as the primary driving forces in the work. According to critic Ashok Vajpeyi, colours were shed of their formal purpose, but instead were laden with emotionally charged resonances, often depicting seasons or moods. It is likely that the dark colour palette in La Nuit emerges from the depths of Raza’s childhood memories spent in the dense forests of Madhya Pradesh, and the fear and fascination associated with them. “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 Vajpeyi, p. 197)

Coincidentally, the present lot was painted the same year that Raza was invited as a visiting lecturer at UC Berkeley in California. During visits to New York, he discovered works by Abstract Expressionists Hans Hoffman and Mark Rothko, and he was particularly impacted by the works of the latter. “Rothko’s work opened up lots of interesting associations for me... It was like a door that opened to another interior vision. Yes, I felt that I was awakening to the music of another forest, one of subliminal energy.” (Artist quoted in Raza: Celebrating 85 Years, New Delhi: Aryan Art Gallery, 2007) The present lot is an example of Raza’s intuitive exploration of colour relationships as he forged a new path in the genre of landscape painting in modern Indian art.

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