“In my opinion, colour in Rajasthan represents ecstasy. The Jain and Rajput miniatures have always been a source of inspiration for me.” — S H RAZA

In 1970, having spent two decades in France, S H Raza and his wife Janine Mongillat finally moved into a home of their own in the quaint village of Gorbio in the South of France. Yet even as Raza “was discovering a summer resort for himself, his art was also in some ways rediscovering... “In my opinion, colour in Rajasthan represents ecstasy. The Jain and Rajput miniatures have always been a source of inspiration for me.” — S H RAZA

In 1970, having spent two decades in France, S H Raza and his wife Janine Mongillat finally moved into a home of their own in the quaint village of Gorbio in the South of France. Yet even as Raza “was discovering a summer resort for himself, his art was also in some ways rediscovering his childhood villages, colours, and memories.” (Ashok Vajpeyi, “The Passionate Grace”, A Life in Art: S H Raza, New Delhi: Art Alive Gallery, 2007, p. 80) The artist began making frequent trips to India during the 1970s, travelling to his home state of Madhya Pradesh, Gujarat, and Rajasthan, the focus of the present lot. These visits gave rise to an important shift in his artistic practice as he sought to reconcile the plastic skills and formalism he had learnt in France with the forms, colours, and philosophies he had engaged with in India. Raza saw this return to his roots not as an act of nostalgia but as a natural and necessary evolution that would give his art renewed vitality and meaning. He explained, “I am constantly in touch with India. When I listen to Chaturlal playing the tabla, or watch a kathak dance or read Hindi poetry, these create a whole colour canvas in my mind… I personally feel that as you go to different countries, you assimilate new ideas. All this is returned back to the sources which have been important to you from your childhood. Other elements, views, ideas, colour perceptions for instance, which are very strong in India-they come back to you with a new vitality. You are conscious of them. And as the work grows, as ideas grow, you incorporate these into your work.” (Artist quoted in (Geeti Sen, “Ma: The Motherland”, Bindu: Space and Time in Raza’s Vision, New Delhi: Media Transasia Limited, 1997, p. 83)

This period of transition forms a crucial bridge between the fluid, gestural style, marked by a deeper, more contrasting palette, which Raza had developed during the 1960s and the structured geometric compositions that came to define his works from the mid-1980s onwards. Influenced by Abstract Expressionists such as Willem de Kooning, Sam Francis, Hans Hoffman, and Mark Rothko-whose work he came across while teaching in Berkeley in 1962, as well as in Paris-his brushwork grew increasingly expressive. As he has explained, “Instead of being constructions, my paintings from the 1970s are more gestural in technique and expression. In terms of colour too, they are expressionistic. The spontaneity was new and compulsive-I let the canvas grow…” (Artist quoted in Sen, p. 59)

Colour began to take precedence over formal construction, driven by Raza’s growing awareness that “colours have both emotive content and spiritual resonances.” (Vajpeyi, p. 111) He explored the emotive and symbolic potential of colour, making it the central focus of his compositions. Poet and critic Ashok Vajpeyi elaborates, “...colours were not being used as merely formal elements: they were emotionally charged. Their movements or consonances on the canvases seemed more and more to be provoked by emotions, reflecting or embodying emotive content. The earlier objectivity, or perhaps the distance started getting replaced or at least modified by an emergent subjectivity-colours started to carry the light load of emotions more than ever before.” (Vajpeyi, p. 78)

Besides his beloved Madhya Pradesh, where he had been raised as a child, Raza was increasingly drawn to the stark beauty of Rajasthan. Instead of offering a literal representation of the region in the present lot, he evokes the heat of its scorching desert landscape through a vivid palette of fiery reds, intense ochre, warm greens, and flashes of white. He arranges the composition into a grid and encloses it within a red border, reminiscent of Jain and Rajput miniature paintings, which were a major source of inspiration for him. Though his brushstrokes remain largely gestural, they occasionally resolve themselves into imprecise triangles and squares, hinting at the emergence of the structured geometry that would become synonymous with his work during his later career.

Critic Geeti Sen remarks, “Rajasthan becomes a metaphor for the colours of India: of vibrant greens and vermilion and ochres, as also blacks. Rajasthan is the mapping out of a metaphorical space in the mind which is then enclosed with a broad border in bold vermilion… The image becomes thus enshrined as an icon, as sacred geography.” (Sen, p. 98) She also draws parallels between Raza’s technique and Indian Ragamala paintings of the 16th century which similarly utilised colour to evoke the mood of a particular raga or melody, which was often associated with a specific season or time of day..

The expressive quality of the canvas is heightened through Raza’s use of black, whose depth and intensity allows the brilliant primary colours to come alive on the pictorial surface. This powerful juxtaposition, which characterises some of the artist’s most impactful works, arose from early memories of Madhya Pradesh. The stark contrast between the dazzling daylight and the eerie darkness of the dense forests at night was both fascinating and terrifying and left a lasting impression on him. As he once recalled, “Nights in the forest were hallucinating; sometimes the only humanising influence was the dancing of the Gond tribes. Daybreak brought back a sentiment of security and well?being. On market?day, under the radiant sun, the village was a fairyland of colours. And then, the night again. Even today I find that these two aspects of my life dominate me and are an integral part of my paintings.” (Artist quoted in Yashodhara Dalmia, “The Burning Landscape”, Sayed Haider Raza, Noida: HarperCollins, 2021, p. 79)

While nature had been at the root of Raza’s artistic expression during the 1950s and 1960s, by the 1970s he had become attuned to a much broader, universal understanding of nature as a cosmic element that binds all life forms together. Works like the present lot illustrate this new perspective where “painting acts itself out as a natural force, struggling in the darkness, breaking into light, shivering in cold, burning in heat, trying to find form and yet dissolving into chaos.” (Rudy von Leyden, “1977-1989 A Focus on the Bindu & its Early Variations”, Ashok Vajpeyi ed., Sayed Haider Raza, Ahmedabad: Mapin Publishing in association with The Raza Foundation, 2023, p. 262)

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