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拍品专文
“France gave me several acquisitions. First of all, ‘le sens plastique’, by which I mean a certain understanding of the vital elements in painting. Second, a measure of clear thinking and rationality. The third, which follows from this proposition, is a sense of order and proportion in form and structure. Lastly, France has given me a sense of savoir vivre: the ability to perceive and to follow a certain discerning quality in life” (Artist statement, A. Vajpeyi, ed., A Life in Art: S.H. Raza, New Delhi, 2007, p. 64).
Arriving in France in October 1949 on a scholarship from the French Government to attend the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts, Sayed Haider Raza immediately immersed himself in the thriving Parisian art world. Lots 330-335 in this catalogue bring together six remarkable paintings from the first decade Raza spent in Paris. The collection, acquired from Raza’s gallerist Lara Vincy in the late 1950s, traces the artist’s evolution from 1951 to 1957, underlining the major transformations during his artistic development over these formative years. This period follows Raza from his years as a student, forging his own visual idiom inspired by Byzantine and Romanesque influences, to his first experiments with painterly application, abstraction, Post Impressionism and Expressionism.
During this period, Raza travelled across France and Italy, visiting the picturesque villages of sun soaked Provence and seaside towns such as Menton, with its colourful elongated houses. The influence of which is clearly seen lot 330, Landscape from Provence, 1951, and that of the hilltop villages such as his future home of Gorbio, is seen in paintings like lot 333, Untitled (Paysage Jaune avec Eglise), 1957. Raza’s style and scale dramatically evolved in the mid-1950s, largely because of a decisive change in his fortunes, when Lara Vincy agreed to exhibit his work at a pivotal moment in his career. If this had not come to pass, it is likely that the impoverished artist would have returned to India, changing the course of his career dramatically. Each of the six lots in this group captures the essence of the decade in which Raza became the modern master he is recognised as today.
Lot 330, Landscape from Provence, 1951, epitomizes Raza’s early French style, deeply shaped by Byzantine and Romanesque art, with its rich jewel-like houses glowing against the burning yellow-gold background, reminiscent of Sienese altarpieces of the 12th century. For more information about this rare painting, please see the dedicated lot essay for lot 330.
Upon completion of his studies in 1952, Raza encountered the financial challenges of a struggling artist in the unforgiving art world of postwar Paris. On Christmas Eve 1954, in a period of hardship and crisis, Raza wrote emotionally of how he considered giving up and returning to India. “I am exhausted, physically. It’s not possible to bear any longer this material wait from day to day [...] I have decided to go back to India, about April. You know that it will be good to be back in my country” (Artist statement, letter to L. Nordentoft, Paris, 24 December 1954).
In 1955, however, the artist’s fortunes suddenly turned. Raza 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 switch 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. Working on a more ambitious scale, the artist’s interests moved from the Middle Ages to 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).
Raza’s first solo show was held at Galerie Lara Vincy in 1955. The role that the gallery played in this period cannot be overstated. From the mid-1950s onward, Vincy became a vital supporter of Raza’s work, providing both exhibition opportunities and critical visibility. It was through this gallery that many of his early European landscapes entered significant private collections. Lots 330-335 were all acquired from her gallery during this period.
Describing Raza’s work of the time, the critic Rudy von Leyden wrote, “The image of Raza's paintings of his recent period is difficult to define. His paintings still show houses, spires, trees and other elements of landscape emerging out of colour which is their true element. The 'subject' is irrelevant but the 'image' persists. Perhaps it was Jacques Lassaigne who found the best description of this image as a world amid the contending powers of darkness and light. These last few years in Paris brought real recognition. He won the Prix de la Critique in 1956 as the first non-French painter ever. He found in the Galerie Lara Vincy in the Rue de Seine not only friends and champions of his cause but also the organizational basis for his career which is important in the Western world where art is not only a vocation but also a most competitive business” (R. von Leyden, Raza, Bombay, 1959, p. 19).
By the mid-1950s, the architectural clarity of Raza’s landscapes began to dissolve into increasingly gestural and abstract fields of color. The structural discipline learned from Cézanne and the spiritual order absorbed from medieval art did not disappear, but became internalized. As seen in lots 331-335, Raza’s work became increasingly avant garde and the landscape gradually transformed from observed environment into a vehicle for chromatic and formal exploration, anticipating the fully abstract language that would later define his oeuvre.
Lot 332, Untitled (La Zone, Fond Orange), 1956, shows how in just five years Raza’s treatment of pigment and paper dramatically evolved. The bright yellow remains, yet the structures jostle for position. The diagonal line, so controlled and stable in lot 330, his gouache from 1951, now feels animated and autonomous.
Painted a year later, lot 333, Untitled (Paysage Jaune avec Eglise), is one of the artist’s signature hillside village scenes. The jagged and meandering line supports the village structures that seem to sprout from the hill. The vibrant yellow discussed in both lots 330 and 332, suggests the golden sunshine of Provence, a region the artist would call home for much of the rest of his life.
Lot 335, Untitled (Village la Nuit), painted in 1956, is the only nightscape in the collection, and provides a striking foil to the bright yellow palette of lots 331-333. Raza uses rich impasto brushwork to ingeniously build up underlayers of color in the night sky with reds and blues so that, as the black paint that he laid over them dried, these colors twinkled and danced across the canvas. The crackle of electricity on summer nights in Provence is palpable in the present painting. Under the cloak of darkness, the houses seem to curve and bow in the foreground, shaking off structural restraints. Untitled (Village la Nuit) reveals that by 1956, Raza’s relationship with color had already taken precedence over form and literal representation, and within a few years forms would entirely vanish from his compositions.
Lot 331, Untitled (Eglise Rouge), also 1956, and lot 334, Untitled (Eglise Blanche), painted in 1957, are two spectacular and particular depictions of place. Eglise Blanche recalls the monumental Romanesque church façades of France, such as Notre-Dame la Grande in Poitiers. The architecture of Eglise Rouge, with its bright red façade and marine blue sky, suggests a northern or western French Church type, while the stylized vegetation introduces a more ambiguous, possibly Mediterranean note. As in many of Raza’s early landscapes, the setting appears synthesized, rather than topographically exact. These two works offer strikingly different interpretations of Raza’s most iconic subject matter of the period.
Together, lots 330-335 represent an exceptional group of works by Raza from the 1950s, capturing his fundamental art historical influences from medieval and Sienese art to the Post Impressionists and lived geography of the South of France. The stylistic development seen in these works as the decade progressed anticipates the artist’s eventual transition to abstraction and the expression of place as felt emotion rather than seen landscape. Even as Raza absorbed art historical precedents, he remained deeply responsive to place. The golden light and chromatic vibrancy of southern France left an indelible mark on his palette. The pastel houses and clustered hill towns of Provence, rendered through memory and structural refinement, became both real and imagined spaces. Landscape, for Raza, was never merely topographical; it was distilled experience.
It is not surprising that Raza’s extraordinary output during this period led to his being awarded the Prix de la Critique in 1956, becoming the first non-French and first Indian artist to win this honor. Alongside these masterful paintings, such achievements stand testament to the freshness of vision of one of India’s most revered modern masters.
Arriving in France in October 1949 on a scholarship from the French Government to attend the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts, Sayed Haider Raza immediately immersed himself in the thriving Parisian art world. Lots 330-335 in this catalogue bring together six remarkable paintings from the first decade Raza spent in Paris. The collection, acquired from Raza’s gallerist Lara Vincy in the late 1950s, traces the artist’s evolution from 1951 to 1957, underlining the major transformations during his artistic development over these formative years. This period follows Raza from his years as a student, forging his own visual idiom inspired by Byzantine and Romanesque influences, to his first experiments with painterly application, abstraction, Post Impressionism and Expressionism.
During this period, Raza travelled across France and Italy, visiting the picturesque villages of sun soaked Provence and seaside towns such as Menton, with its colourful elongated houses. The influence of which is clearly seen lot 330, Landscape from Provence, 1951, and that of the hilltop villages such as his future home of Gorbio, is seen in paintings like lot 333, Untitled (Paysage Jaune avec Eglise), 1957. Raza’s style and scale dramatically evolved in the mid-1950s, largely because of a decisive change in his fortunes, when Lara Vincy agreed to exhibit his work at a pivotal moment in his career. If this had not come to pass, it is likely that the impoverished artist would have returned to India, changing the course of his career dramatically. Each of the six lots in this group captures the essence of the decade in which Raza became the modern master he is recognised as today.
Lot 330, Landscape from Provence, 1951, epitomizes Raza’s early French style, deeply shaped by Byzantine and Romanesque art, with its rich jewel-like houses glowing against the burning yellow-gold background, reminiscent of Sienese altarpieces of the 12th century. For more information about this rare painting, please see the dedicated lot essay for lot 330.
Upon completion of his studies in 1952, Raza encountered the financial challenges of a struggling artist in the unforgiving art world of postwar Paris. On Christmas Eve 1954, in a period of hardship and crisis, Raza wrote emotionally of how he considered giving up and returning to India. “I am exhausted, physically. It’s not possible to bear any longer this material wait from day to day [...] I have decided to go back to India, about April. You know that it will be good to be back in my country” (Artist statement, letter to L. Nordentoft, Paris, 24 December 1954).
In 1955, however, the artist’s fortunes suddenly turned. Raza 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 switch 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. Working on a more ambitious scale, the artist’s interests moved from the Middle Ages to 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).
Raza’s first solo show was held at Galerie Lara Vincy in 1955. The role that the gallery played in this period cannot be overstated. From the mid-1950s onward, Vincy became a vital supporter of Raza’s work, providing both exhibition opportunities and critical visibility. It was through this gallery that many of his early European landscapes entered significant private collections. Lots 330-335 were all acquired from her gallery during this period.
Describing Raza’s work of the time, the critic Rudy von Leyden wrote, “The image of Raza's paintings of his recent period is difficult to define. His paintings still show houses, spires, trees and other elements of landscape emerging out of colour which is their true element. The 'subject' is irrelevant but the 'image' persists. Perhaps it was Jacques Lassaigne who found the best description of this image as a world amid the contending powers of darkness and light. These last few years in Paris brought real recognition. He won the Prix de la Critique in 1956 as the first non-French painter ever. He found in the Galerie Lara Vincy in the Rue de Seine not only friends and champions of his cause but also the organizational basis for his career which is important in the Western world where art is not only a vocation but also a most competitive business” (R. von Leyden, Raza, Bombay, 1959, p. 19).
By the mid-1950s, the architectural clarity of Raza’s landscapes began to dissolve into increasingly gestural and abstract fields of color. The structural discipline learned from Cézanne and the spiritual order absorbed from medieval art did not disappear, but became internalized. As seen in lots 331-335, Raza’s work became increasingly avant garde and the landscape gradually transformed from observed environment into a vehicle for chromatic and formal exploration, anticipating the fully abstract language that would later define his oeuvre.
Lot 332, Untitled (La Zone, Fond Orange), 1956, shows how in just five years Raza’s treatment of pigment and paper dramatically evolved. The bright yellow remains, yet the structures jostle for position. The diagonal line, so controlled and stable in lot 330, his gouache from 1951, now feels animated and autonomous.
Painted a year later, lot 333, Untitled (Paysage Jaune avec Eglise), is one of the artist’s signature hillside village scenes. The jagged and meandering line supports the village structures that seem to sprout from the hill. The vibrant yellow discussed in both lots 330 and 332, suggests the golden sunshine of Provence, a region the artist would call home for much of the rest of his life.
Lot 335, Untitled (Village la Nuit), painted in 1956, is the only nightscape in the collection, and provides a striking foil to the bright yellow palette of lots 331-333. Raza uses rich impasto brushwork to ingeniously build up underlayers of color in the night sky with reds and blues so that, as the black paint that he laid over them dried, these colors twinkled and danced across the canvas. The crackle of electricity on summer nights in Provence is palpable in the present painting. Under the cloak of darkness, the houses seem to curve and bow in the foreground, shaking off structural restraints. Untitled (Village la Nuit) reveals that by 1956, Raza’s relationship with color had already taken precedence over form and literal representation, and within a few years forms would entirely vanish from his compositions.
Lot 331, Untitled (Eglise Rouge), also 1956, and lot 334, Untitled (Eglise Blanche), painted in 1957, are two spectacular and particular depictions of place. Eglise Blanche recalls the monumental Romanesque church façades of France, such as Notre-Dame la Grande in Poitiers. The architecture of Eglise Rouge, with its bright red façade and marine blue sky, suggests a northern or western French Church type, while the stylized vegetation introduces a more ambiguous, possibly Mediterranean note. As in many of Raza’s early landscapes, the setting appears synthesized, rather than topographically exact. These two works offer strikingly different interpretations of Raza’s most iconic subject matter of the period.
Together, lots 330-335 represent an exceptional group of works by Raza from the 1950s, capturing his fundamental art historical influences from medieval and Sienese art to the Post Impressionists and lived geography of the South of France. The stylistic development seen in these works as the decade progressed anticipates the artist’s eventual transition to abstraction and the expression of place as felt emotion rather than seen landscape. Even as Raza absorbed art historical precedents, he remained deeply responsive to place. The golden light and chromatic vibrancy of southern France left an indelible mark on his palette. The pastel houses and clustered hill towns of Provence, rendered through memory and structural refinement, became both real and imagined spaces. Landscape, for Raza, was never merely topographical; it was distilled experience.
It is not surprising that Raza’s extraordinary output during this period led to his being awarded the Prix de la Critique in 1956, becoming the first non-French and first Indian artist to win this honor. Alongside these masterful paintings, such achievements stand testament to the freshness of vision of one of India’s most revered modern masters.