Important Notice

Shortly after graduating from the J J School of Art, S H Raza left India for France to attend the École Nationale des Beaux-Arts on a French Government scholarship. He immersed himself in Paris’ thriving art scene, “moving from discovery to discovery [...] Paris offered me museums, exhibitions, libraries, theatre, ballet, films-in short, a living culture!” (Artist quoted in Geeti Sen, “La Forge: The Furnace”, Bindu: Space and Time in ... Shortly after graduating from the J J School of Art, S H Raza left India for France to attend the École Nationale des Beaux-Arts on a French Government scholarship. He immersed himself in Paris’ thriving art scene, “moving from discovery to discovery [...] Paris offered me museums, exhibitions, libraries, theatre, ballet, films-in short, a living culture!” (Artist quoted in Geeti Sen, “La Forge: The Furnace”, Bindu: Space and Time in Raza’s Vision, New Delhi: Media Transasia Limited, 1997, p. 55) These early years in Paris proved formative to his artistic practice and expanded his intellectual outlook. Decades later he recalled how his adopted home shaped his art: “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 sense of savoir vivre: the ability to perceive and to follow a certain discerning quality in life.” (Artist quoted in Sen, p. 57)

“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.” - (Jacques Lassaigne, Raza, Paris: Galerie Lara Vincy, 1958)

Raza was inspired by the palette and compositional structure of the Post‒Impressionists, particularly Van Gogh and Cézanne, whose paintings he encountered firsthand at the city’s museums. He also travelled extensively through the French countryside, visiting places such as Chartres, Avignon, and Aix‒en‒Provence. The landscapes he encountered there, with their “trees, mountains, villages, and churches”, became his “staple diet”, and provided the subject for works such as the present lot. (Yashodhara Dalmia, “Journeys With the Black Sun”, The Making of Modern Indian Art, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2001, pp. 151‒152)

Painted in 1958, Village Otta Corse represents a significant stylistic transition in Raza’s practice. By this time, he had moved away from the precisely ordered, Cubist‒inspired townscapes of the early 1950s and allowed colour and texture to take precedence. Using thick impasto and gestural brushstrokes, he builds up an impression of the scenic mountain village of Ota, on the island of Corsica, where clusters of red and brown homes seem to sprout out of terraced slopes flanked by rugged peaks. The painting captures the small town as night descends, demonstrating Raza’s growing interest in conveying atmosphere and emotion over tangible detail. Forms would soon vanish from his work entirely in the coming years as his interest in non‒figurative expression continued to deepen.

This stylistic shift coincided with Raza’s increasing preference for oil over watercolour and gouache, a change that transformed his handling of colour and form. As critic Rudolf von Leyden—one of the artist’s earliest patrons and supporters—noted, “His colours take on an entirely new complexion. Brilliant reds and yellows stand out against large looming forces of black and deep Prussian blue. Shapes dissolve in seas of colours which are by no means unorganised and fluid but seem to move and evolve within the space of the painting… 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.” Leyden regarded this change of medium as “not merely technical” but an indicator of a “fundamental change of attitude. The scholar, who had measured and calculated, burst through the confines of a limited understanding of colour and space‒created‒by‒colour into a sphere of full realisation.” (Rudolf von Leyden, Raza, Bombay: Sadanga Publications, 1959, p. 19)

By 1958, Raza had established himself as one of the leading members of a new generation of Indian artists working in Post‒War Europe. His group exhibitions with F N Souza and Akbar Padamsee at Galerie Saint‒ Placide in 1952 and Galerie Creuze in 1953 attracted critical attention, and in 1955 he signed an exclusive contract with Galerie Lara Vincy, from which the present lot was originally acquired. The following year, he became the first non‒French artist to receive the Prix de la Critique, a distinction that earned him international recognition. He exhibited at the Venice Biennale and in Tokyo in 1957. In 1958—the year Village Otta Corse was painted—he had his first solo exhibition at Galerie Lara Vincy, and participated in the Brussels and São Paulo Biennales with exhibitions in New York and Britain.

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