.jpg?w=1)
.jpg?w=1)
Lot Essay
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 the earth, bathed in cold light; schematic houses stretching away in a sinuous line, suspended in the sky beneath a black sun.
- Jacques Lassaigne, 1958
One of India’s leading modern masters, Sayed Haider Raza was a member of the revolutionary but short-lived Progressive Artists’ Group founded in 1947, the year of the country’s Independence. Two years later, Raza received a scholarship from the French Government to attend the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts, and left India for Paris. Arriving in France in October 1949, the artist excitedly recollected absorbing the thriving local art scene and eagerly visiting all the museums and soaking the culture in.
Seeing the color and composition of Post-Impressionist paintings in person for the first time came as a revelation to Raza. He recollects, “I went to the museum again and again and tried to understand what was construction according to Cézanne. I read the book of Kandinsky Concerning the Spiritual in Art and I studied particularly Cubism in which paintings were very carefully constructed. I also went to the extent of finding out what Mondrian and Vasarely had done with pure geometry and what Nicolas de Stael did to it” (Artist statement, A. Vajpeyi, ed., A Life in Art: S.H. Raza, Hyderabad, 2007, p. 64).
Raza’s practice during these early years in Paris evolved rapidly as he travelled far and wide in France, Italy and Spain and assimilated what he learnt from the works of art he encountered. Writing to a friend from art school about these early transformational experiences, he noted, “I realise more and more now more than ever, how the Post-Impressionist movement rescued painting from the aerobatics of the academicians to the creation of significant form. Cézanne, the earliest manifestation of this movement, occupies a dominating position and it’s amazing to see the crop of good art that followed later” (Artist statement, letter to L. Nordentoft, Paris, 15 January 1950). Following this critical realization, Raza turned from the limpid watercolors he was painting towards a bolder more ambitious and modernist idiom, and began to work on a larger scale, first with gouache and then with oils to create a new kind of landscape.
The present lot, painted in 1953 and titled Black Sun, is one of the most important examples of the new, ‘schematic’ landscapes Raza turned to during his first years in Paris, and one of the finest illustrations of what the art historian and critic Jaques Lassaigne dubbed the ‘lightness of touch’ that characterized this ‘classical’ period of his oeuvre. Held in high regard by the artist and widely published over the decades as an exemplar of this phase of his career, this seminal painting was first exhibited at Galerie Raymond Creuze in Paris as part of a group show Raza held with Francis Newton Souza and Akbar Padamsee in 1953. It was acquired from this exhibition by Mr and Mrs Lassaigne and has remained in their family collection ever since. After Raza became the first foreign artist to be awarded France’s coveted Prix de la Critique in 1956, this painting from the Lassaigne family collection was selected to be included in an exhibition at Galerie Lara Vincy in Paris commemorating this achievement, for which Lassaigne wrote the catalogue essay.
In addition to the importance of pictorial space and construction that he learned from the works of artists like Cézanne, the profound impact that French and Italian art of the middle ages had on Raza is also clear in the present lot. As Rudi Von Leyden pointed out, “It was the art of medieval Europe and the early Renaissance that spoke to him most convincingly. Byzantine painting, romanesque sculpture, and the Italian primitives particularly of the Sienese school, such as Simone Martini and Lorenzetti, appealed to him in their austerity which was capable of conveying the most exquisite poetic sensitivity” (R. Von Leyden, Raza, Bombay, 1959, p. 18).
In another letter from the time, Raza emphasized this influence, writing “The other exhibition I am most excited about is the ‘trèsor d’Art du Moyen Age d’Italie. Actually it is the work of middle ages in Italy that touches me the most – 11th to 14th Century. And fortunately for me this exhibition has work of this golden age. I do not understand why still people in Europe call it middle age – and the artists of this epoque are called ‘primitives’. To me these are the greatest creators Italy has produced. Renaissance and after it almost all artists leave me cold right upto 19th Century when Cézanne appeared on the Art World [...] I found two excellent landscapes – small ones by Lorenzetti. This bloke has done – 7 centuries before I was born, the things I am doing now [...] He was a great master and I want to draw from the Italian and Byzantine ‘primitives’ more than the best known masters of the Renaissance” (Artist statement, letter to Lydia Nordentoft, 16 June 1952).
“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. 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” (R. Von Leyden, Raza, Bombay, 1959, p. 18).
Black Sun is the result of this concentrated period of learning and growth in Raza’s career, that Von Leyden terms his ‘scholarly’ phase of crystallization. Here, an undulating row of houses rendered in shades of umber and sienna, snakes across a surface that is dramatically divided between light and dark, day and night. Each flattened cubist form is meticulously rendered with distinctive chimneys, turrets, doors or windows such that no two are the same. The eponymous black sun hangs ominously above the uninhabited structures, crowning this striking image and challenging the supposed primacy of the manmade in the natural world. While earlier works in this small series of delicate gouaches were based on specific locations like the French villages of Carcassonne and Haut de Cagnes, Black Sun is not connected to any explicit place or time, adding a new layer to Raza’s cerebral meditation on form, space, color and construction in this work.
This particular painting becomes even more significant when read within the context of Raza’s complete oeuvre, as one of the earliest indications of his turn to a geometric visual vocabulary centered on the black orb or bindu decades later. It is also the first work that foreshadows Raza’s interest in exploring the system of balances inherent in the natural world, particularly through dichotomies between light and darkness, day and night. In Black Sun, these oppositions are expressed with the refined understanding of color and burnished, enamel-like finish drawn from Raza’s studies of classical Indian painting traditions, and the sensitive handling of pigment that the artist is universally recognized for today.
Writing about this aspect of the present lot, Alain Bonfand notes, “In 1953, in a painting titled Black Sun, Soleil Noir [...], a black circle orchestrates a landscape, or rather orchestrates the progressive geometrization of a landscape. This black sun is consciously or unconsciously the bindu, but as hostage of an aesthetic of mimesis, or to better grasp it in relation to what has just been said, an aesthetic where the beings of the world, city, house, landscape, still counterbalance this essential motif of revelation. Precisely in a painting like Black Sun, we see the elements of geometry orchestrated, the imposing black rectangle dividing the painting, the black parallelograms or triangles become roofs of houses, the black circle – the bindu – is the black sun illuminating the painting. In such a work, we get the impression that it is the forms of geometry which seek those of representation, and not the opposite. In Black Sun, the black circle, rectangle or trapezoids encounter, as in an imposed figure, an aesthetic of representation and become in some way its voluntary hostages, as if an abstraction that is already here, omnipotent, needed a pretext for some more time” (Translated from A. Bonfand, ‘Force sans face’, Raza, Paris, 2008, p. 19).
Held in high esteem since it was painted more than seventy years ago, today we understand Black Sun as a vital, multilayered work of art that represents the transformative journey Raza undertook over the course of his artistic career, spanning several decades and continents. The artist summed it up best, writing to a friend in 1952, “Houses! Always houses. But are not they beautiful. They are yet solitary. ‘Who lives there?’ someone asked me. ‘Me’ was my reply” (Artist statement, letter to Lydia Nordentoft, 30 July 1952).
- Jacques Lassaigne, 1958
One of India’s leading modern masters, Sayed Haider Raza was a member of the revolutionary but short-lived Progressive Artists’ Group founded in 1947, the year of the country’s Independence. Two years later, Raza received a scholarship from the French Government to attend the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts, and left India for Paris. Arriving in France in October 1949, the artist excitedly recollected absorbing the thriving local art scene and eagerly visiting all the museums and soaking the culture in.
Seeing the color and composition of Post-Impressionist paintings in person for the first time came as a revelation to Raza. He recollects, “I went to the museum again and again and tried to understand what was construction according to Cézanne. I read the book of Kandinsky Concerning the Spiritual in Art and I studied particularly Cubism in which paintings were very carefully constructed. I also went to the extent of finding out what Mondrian and Vasarely had done with pure geometry and what Nicolas de Stael did to it” (Artist statement, A. Vajpeyi, ed., A Life in Art: S.H. Raza, Hyderabad, 2007, p. 64).
Raza’s practice during these early years in Paris evolved rapidly as he travelled far and wide in France, Italy and Spain and assimilated what he learnt from the works of art he encountered. Writing to a friend from art school about these early transformational experiences, he noted, “I realise more and more now more than ever, how the Post-Impressionist movement rescued painting from the aerobatics of the academicians to the creation of significant form. Cézanne, the earliest manifestation of this movement, occupies a dominating position and it’s amazing to see the crop of good art that followed later” (Artist statement, letter to L. Nordentoft, Paris, 15 January 1950). Following this critical realization, Raza turned from the limpid watercolors he was painting towards a bolder more ambitious and modernist idiom, and began to work on a larger scale, first with gouache and then with oils to create a new kind of landscape.
The present lot, painted in 1953 and titled Black Sun, is one of the most important examples of the new, ‘schematic’ landscapes Raza turned to during his first years in Paris, and one of the finest illustrations of what the art historian and critic Jaques Lassaigne dubbed the ‘lightness of touch’ that characterized this ‘classical’ period of his oeuvre. Held in high regard by the artist and widely published over the decades as an exemplar of this phase of his career, this seminal painting was first exhibited at Galerie Raymond Creuze in Paris as part of a group show Raza held with Francis Newton Souza and Akbar Padamsee in 1953. It was acquired from this exhibition by Mr and Mrs Lassaigne and has remained in their family collection ever since. After Raza became the first foreign artist to be awarded France’s coveted Prix de la Critique in 1956, this painting from the Lassaigne family collection was selected to be included in an exhibition at Galerie Lara Vincy in Paris commemorating this achievement, for which Lassaigne wrote the catalogue essay.
In addition to the importance of pictorial space and construction that he learned from the works of artists like Cézanne, the profound impact that French and Italian art of the middle ages had on Raza is also clear in the present lot. As Rudi Von Leyden pointed out, “It was the art of medieval Europe and the early Renaissance that spoke to him most convincingly. Byzantine painting, romanesque sculpture, and the Italian primitives particularly of the Sienese school, such as Simone Martini and Lorenzetti, appealed to him in their austerity which was capable of conveying the most exquisite poetic sensitivity” (R. Von Leyden, Raza, Bombay, 1959, p. 18).
In another letter from the time, Raza emphasized this influence, writing “The other exhibition I am most excited about is the ‘trèsor d’Art du Moyen Age d’Italie. Actually it is the work of middle ages in Italy that touches me the most – 11th to 14th Century. And fortunately for me this exhibition has work of this golden age. I do not understand why still people in Europe call it middle age – and the artists of this epoque are called ‘primitives’. To me these are the greatest creators Italy has produced. Renaissance and after it almost all artists leave me cold right upto 19th Century when Cézanne appeared on the Art World [...] I found two excellent landscapes – small ones by Lorenzetti. This bloke has done – 7 centuries before I was born, the things I am doing now [...] He was a great master and I want to draw from the Italian and Byzantine ‘primitives’ more than the best known masters of the Renaissance” (Artist statement, letter to Lydia Nordentoft, 16 June 1952).
“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. 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” (R. Von Leyden, Raza, Bombay, 1959, p. 18).
Black Sun is the result of this concentrated period of learning and growth in Raza’s career, that Von Leyden terms his ‘scholarly’ phase of crystallization. Here, an undulating row of houses rendered in shades of umber and sienna, snakes across a surface that is dramatically divided between light and dark, day and night. Each flattened cubist form is meticulously rendered with distinctive chimneys, turrets, doors or windows such that no two are the same. The eponymous black sun hangs ominously above the uninhabited structures, crowning this striking image and challenging the supposed primacy of the manmade in the natural world. While earlier works in this small series of delicate gouaches were based on specific locations like the French villages of Carcassonne and Haut de Cagnes, Black Sun is not connected to any explicit place or time, adding a new layer to Raza’s cerebral meditation on form, space, color and construction in this work.
This particular painting becomes even more significant when read within the context of Raza’s complete oeuvre, as one of the earliest indications of his turn to a geometric visual vocabulary centered on the black orb or bindu decades later. It is also the first work that foreshadows Raza’s interest in exploring the system of balances inherent in the natural world, particularly through dichotomies between light and darkness, day and night. In Black Sun, these oppositions are expressed with the refined understanding of color and burnished, enamel-like finish drawn from Raza’s studies of classical Indian painting traditions, and the sensitive handling of pigment that the artist is universally recognized for today.
Writing about this aspect of the present lot, Alain Bonfand notes, “In 1953, in a painting titled Black Sun, Soleil Noir [...], a black circle orchestrates a landscape, or rather orchestrates the progressive geometrization of a landscape. This black sun is consciously or unconsciously the bindu, but as hostage of an aesthetic of mimesis, or to better grasp it in relation to what has just been said, an aesthetic where the beings of the world, city, house, landscape, still counterbalance this essential motif of revelation. Precisely in a painting like Black Sun, we see the elements of geometry orchestrated, the imposing black rectangle dividing the painting, the black parallelograms or triangles become roofs of houses, the black circle – the bindu – is the black sun illuminating the painting. In such a work, we get the impression that it is the forms of geometry which seek those of representation, and not the opposite. In Black Sun, the black circle, rectangle or trapezoids encounter, as in an imposed figure, an aesthetic of representation and become in some way its voluntary hostages, as if an abstraction that is already here, omnipotent, needed a pretext for some more time” (Translated from A. Bonfand, ‘Force sans face’, Raza, Paris, 2008, p. 19).
Held in high esteem since it was painted more than seventy years ago, today we understand Black Sun as a vital, multilayered work of art that represents the transformative journey Raza undertook over the course of his artistic career, spanning several decades and continents. The artist summed it up best, writing to a friend in 1952, “Houses! Always houses. But are not they beautiful. They are yet solitary. ‘Who lives there?’ someone asked me. ‘Me’ was my reply” (Artist statement, letter to Lydia Nordentoft, 30 July 1952).