Important Notice

“In the West, one paints that which can be seen by the retina of the eye. I have gone beyond immediate vision, I wish to grasp Prakriti, which is Nature.” - S H RAZA

During a chance meeting in Kashmir in 1948, photographer Henri Cartier Bresson gave a young S H Raza a piece of advice that would steer the course of his artistic practice: “You’re a talented painter. But your work needs one element— that is construction. Try to... “In the West, one paints that which can be seen by the retina of the eye. I have gone beyond immediate vision, I wish to grasp Prakriti, which is Nature.” - S H RAZA

During a chance meeting in Kashmir in 1948, photographer Henri Cartier Bresson gave a young S H Raza a piece of advice that would steer the course of his artistic practice: “You’re a talented painter. But your work needs one element— that is construction. Try to understand that a painting is built up. Try to see Cézanne. And if you can give structure to your work it will be an entirely different thing.” (Yashodhara Dalmia, “Journeys With the Black Sun”, The Making of Modern Indian Art, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2001, p. 148) Raza moved to Paris two years later on a government scholarship to study at the École des Beaux‒Arts, marking the beginning of a six‒decade stay in France. There he painted the rural French landscape under the influence of European modernism and the École de Paris while absorbing the lessons of Post Impressionism, particularly Cézanne’s ability to construct a painting through colour and form. His encounter with Abstract Expressionism during a teaching stint at Berkeley in 1962 further expanded his conception of pictorial space, leading him toward a more gestural and fluid form of lyrical abstraction.

Yet even as he achieved considerable acclaim in France, Raza remained dissatisfied. From the 1970s, he increasingly sought to reconcile his Western artistic training with an authentic expression of his Indian identity. Remarking on this turning point, he observed, “It is important that the realisation of one’s self starts with the thread on which are strung all the experiences of one’s childhood, later supplemented by the eclectic knowledge acquired through one’s studies and research. There came a time when I wanted to start from scratch, to close the books, never to visit museums again and stop looking at other artists’ work. An internal journey had begun.” (Artist quoted in Michael Imbert, “Pictorial Evolution From the Figurative to the Gestural”, Raza: An Introduction to His Painting, Noida: Rainbow Publishers, 2003, p. 45)

This inward journey was guided by frequent trips to India, particularly Gujarat, Rajasthan, and his own home state of Madhya Pradesh. He immersed himself in Indian thought, studying poets such as Gajanan Muktibodh, visiting the Buddhist stupas at Sanchi and the rock‒cut caves of Ajanta and Ellora, and spending time with the Gond and Bhil tribes who lived in close harmony with nature. He also returned to the village of Kakaiya and the town of Mandala where he had grown up amid the forests by the Narmada River. These visits “...re‒sensitised his perceptiveness for a final supreme and universal viewing of nature, not as appearance, not as spectacle but as an integrated force of life and cosmic growth reflected in every fibre of a human being…Nature became to Raza something not to be observed or to be imagined but something to be experienced in the very act of putting paint on canvas.” (Rudolf von Leyden, “Metamorphosis”, Raza, Mumbai: Chemould Publications and Arts, 1985)

By the time Raza painted the present lot in the 1980s—a period considered the height of his career—he had distilled these experiences into a concise symbolic language, stripping away all that he considered superfluous in his imagery. Nature, and by extension the universe, was reduced to its essential forces and articulated through a disciplined geometry of intersecting lines, circles, squares, and triangles that came to define his mature oeuvre. Throughout this decade, Raza frequently invoked the earth in the titles of his paintings. Here he envisions it as a sacred mandala where an intersecting network of horizontal and diagonal lines are contained within a square canvas to generate a rhythmic pattern of repeating triangles. According to the ancient Vedic scriptures, the Upanishads, straight lines, diagonal lines, and upright and inverted triangles symbolise the rays of the sun, wind, fire, and water, respectively. The triangles are also understood in Indian philosophical thought to represent purusha and prakriti, the complementary masculine and feminine principles whose union gives rise to creation. Together these geometric forms constitute the yantras, sacred diagrams mapping the underlying order of the universe, which serve as aids to meditation. Raza also employs the earthy tones of the Indian landscape that inspired this pivotal artistic shift in his colour palette. Shades of umber, sienna, red, brown and black evoke the hot, arid terrain of Central India, where he was born and raised.

Though Raza’s paintings share similar philosophical underpinnings and a geometric vocabulary with Tantric practices, he rejected the association maintaining that he lacked sufficient knowledge of its beliefs and rituals. Instead, he emphasised the formal foundations of his practice: “My involvement in work is essentially with the life of form, and all my efforts are directed towards a coherent pictorial logic.” (Artist quoted in Yashodhara Dalmia, “The Indian Eye”, Sayed Haider Raza ‒ The Journey of an Iconic Artist, Noida: HarperCollins, 2021, p. 177)

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