“Be it village or town or church, the world according to Raza was aflame. It was being forged anew through the crucible of recollection-baptised through fire.” — (Geeti Sen, “La Forge: The Furnace”, Bindu: Space and Time in Raza’s Vision, New Delhi: Media Transasia Limited, 1997, p. 66)

By the time the present lot was painted in 1958, S H Raza had spent nearly a decade in France and, in his words, gained “several... “Be it village or town or church, the world according to Raza was aflame. It was being forged anew through the crucible of recollection-baptised through fire.” — (Geeti Sen, “La Forge: The Furnace”, Bindu: Space and Time in Raza’s Vision, New Delhi: Media Transasia Limited, 1997, p. 66)

By the time the present lot was painted in 1958, S H Raza had spent nearly a decade in France and, in his words, gained “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.” (The artist quoted in Geeti Sen, “La Forge: The Furnace”, Bindu Space and Time in Raza’s Vision, New Delhi: Media Transasia Limited, 1997, p. 57)

He had arrived in Paris in September 1950 on a scholarship to study art and immediately immersed himself in the city’s vibrant culture. He closely studied the works of Cézanne, Van Gogh, and Matisse at museums, and engaged with the writings of Sartre, Camus, and Rilke. These experiences proved pivotal to the evolution of his artistic style and understanding of spatial structure, colour, and form. Raza also travelled extensively across France between 1954 and 1965, visiting places like Chartres, Avignon, Aix-en-Provence, and Menton. The French countryside enamoured him and became the primary subject of his art during this decade. Art historian Yashodhara Dalmia affirms, “He moved out to the countryside; to Cezanne’s Provence... and to the Maritime Alps where the French landscape with its trees, mountains, villages, and churches became his staple diet.” (Yashodhara Dalmia, “Journeys With the Black Sun”, The Making of Modern Indian Art, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2001, pp. 151?152)

The present lot is emblematic of an imminent new phase in Raza’s art where he moved from precisely structured landscapes to unrestrained, gestural ones with colour and texture preceding form as the primary focus. Critic Jacques Lassaigne noted this transformation in a catalogue note for a 1958 exhibition at Galerie Lara Vincy writing, “Pure forms take shape no longer in the void, but in revelatory contrast with their surroundings, in light that exults, doubly bright, against the opacity that threatens it. The composition is made to expand or contract, as it retreats in orderly array along a broad avenue or succumbs to the brief ordeal of a stormy disintegration. Walls of houses are no longer smooth planes, they are broad beaches strewn with the hulks of burnt out energies. Behind a foreground of glowing embers or darkling plains looms a mass of lustrous houses. 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 had also been experimenting with new mediums at this time and had begun to increasingly use oils instead of gouache in his work. Art critic Rudy Von Leyden has recognised 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)

Raza had gained considerable success by 1958, a commendable achievement for a young artist of Indian origin in post-war Europe. His group shows with F N Souza and Akbar Padamsee at Galerie Saint-Placide in 1952 and Galerie Creuz in 1953 won him critical recognition. In 1955, he was offered an exclusive contract by Galerie Lara Vincy. A year later, in 1956, he became the first non?French artist to win the prestigious Prix de la Critique which earned him widespread recognition internationally, leading to invitations to exhibit at the Venice Biennale and in Tokyo in 1957, followed by the Biennales at Brussels and Sao Paulo, and shows in New York and Britain in 1958

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