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Lot Essay
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. Arriving in France in October 1949 on a French Government scholarship to attend the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts, the artist immediately immersed himself in the thriving Parisian art world. The coming years proved formative for Raza, bringing his first sustained experiments with painterly application, abstraction, Post-Impressionism and Expressionism.
In 1955, the artist met Lara Vincy, who would become his gallerist, representing him over a transformative period in his career. Madame Vincy offered monthly advances for Raza’s work, allowing him to paint on a more ambitious scale and transition from watercolor and gouache on paper to oil on canvas. This new medium allowed Raza to become more experimental with his use of color, form and texture, and he began to work in the styles of the Second School of Paris, evolving his treatment of the landscape. Freed to work on increasingly expansive canvases, the artist turned from medieval sources toward the innovations of European Modernism. Seeing the color and construction of Post Impressionist paintings in person for the first time proved transformative. He studied Cézanne obsessively, revisited Kandinsky’s Concerning the Spiritual in Art, and examined Cubism for its disciplined construction of pictorial space. “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” (Artist statement, A. Vajpeyi, ed., A Life in Art: S.H. Raza, New Delhi, 2007, p. 64).
The present lot was painted the following year, in 1956, when Raza was awarded the Prix de la Critique, becoming the first non-French and first Indian artist to receive the honor. In this painting, a village seems suspended on a hillside above textured fields of green rendered with rich layers of impasto. Its white houses are staggered, as if cascading down the hill. Almost crashing into one another, these structures create a sense of controlled chaos that adds to the vitality of the surrounding landscape. The roofs, though shrouded in shadow, glow with touches of red and blue beneath a sky animated by passages of yellow, white and blue.
In the words of French critic and curator Jacques Lassaigne, "Discernible in Raza's recent pictures are the forms of houses, trees and mountains; but to conclude on the strength of this that they are a literal description of nature would be to misjudge them entirely. Obviously the villages and country-side of Provence and Italy have cast their spell – fleeting or intense, as the case may be – over the artist; but these impressions have only served to precipitate and crystallize an inner landscape whose blandishments have haunted the artist for years, ever since his youthful familiarity with the intricate architecture and luxuriant vegetation of his native land [...] For all the tragic intensity of its smouldering fires, and the glare of its greenery, the world of Raza hangs in a torrent of potentialities, amid the contending powers of darkness and light” (J. Lassaigne, Raza, Paris, 1958, unpaginated).
In 1955, the artist met Lara Vincy, who would become his gallerist, representing him over a transformative period in his career. Madame Vincy offered monthly advances for Raza’s work, allowing him to paint on a more ambitious scale and transition from watercolor and gouache on paper to oil on canvas. This new medium allowed Raza to become more experimental with his use of color, form and texture, and he began to work in the styles of the Second School of Paris, evolving his treatment of the landscape. Freed to work on increasingly expansive canvases, the artist turned from medieval sources toward the innovations of European Modernism. Seeing the color and construction of Post Impressionist paintings in person for the first time proved transformative. He studied Cézanne obsessively, revisited Kandinsky’s Concerning the Spiritual in Art, and examined Cubism for its disciplined construction of pictorial space. “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” (Artist statement, A. Vajpeyi, ed., A Life in Art: S.H. Raza, New Delhi, 2007, p. 64).
The present lot was painted the following year, in 1956, when Raza was awarded the Prix de la Critique, becoming the first non-French and first Indian artist to receive the honor. In this painting, a village seems suspended on a hillside above textured fields of green rendered with rich layers of impasto. Its white houses are staggered, as if cascading down the hill. Almost crashing into one another, these structures create a sense of controlled chaos that adds to the vitality of the surrounding landscape. The roofs, though shrouded in shadow, glow with touches of red and blue beneath a sky animated by passages of yellow, white and blue.
In the words of French critic and curator Jacques Lassaigne, "Discernible in Raza's recent pictures are the forms of houses, trees and mountains; but to conclude on the strength of this that they are a literal description of nature would be to misjudge them entirely. Obviously the villages and country-side of Provence and Italy have cast their spell – fleeting or intense, as the case may be – over the artist; but these impressions have only served to precipitate and crystallize an inner landscape whose blandishments have haunted the artist for years, ever since his youthful familiarity with the intricate architecture and luxuriant vegetation of his native land [...] For all the tragic intensity of its smouldering fires, and the glare of its greenery, the world of Raza hangs in a torrent of potentialities, amid the contending powers of darkness and light” (J. Lassaigne, Raza, Paris, 1958, unpaginated).