Important Notice

“…visual reality, the aim to construct a ‘tangible’ world, receded. In its place there was a preoccupation with evoking the essence, the mood of places and of people.” — S H RAZA

S H Raza nurtured an intimate connection with nature throughout his life, having grown up as the son of a forest ranger in the lush environs of the Narmada river. When he moved to France as an adult, he was charmed by its bucolic countryside and made its... “…visual reality, the aim to construct a ‘tangible’ world, receded. In its place there was a preoccupation with evoking the essence, the mood of places and of people.” — S H RAZA

S H Raza nurtured an intimate connection with nature throughout his life, having grown up as the son of a forest ranger in the lush environs of the Narmada river. When he moved to France as an adult, he was charmed by its bucolic countryside and made its quaint landscapes and villages the primary subject of his art, particularly during the 1950s and 1960s. As the artist’s engagement with nature continued to evolve, he began to move away from direct representation and formal construction towards a more gestural style where colour gradually took precedence over structure.

By the time he painted the present lot in 1968, nature had become 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, “1977?1989 A Focus on the Bindu & Its Early Variations”,Sayed Haider Raza, Ahmedabad: Mapin Publishing in association with The Raza Foundation, 2023, p. 262) The pictorial space is less structured in paintings from the 1960s, such as this work, and focus on the interplay of light and colour in nature to create an impression of a place and convey the mood and emotion it aroused in the artist. Many works from this period bear titles that reference abstract aspects of nature such as geographical elements, seasons, or times of day. Speaking of Raza’s stylistic transformation during this period, Geeti Sen comments, “Notably the outlines of any cognizant forms have virtually all disappeared-you may catch here and there the glimpse of a figure, the shimmer of leaves on a tree or the vague markings of human habitation. But it is the mood which prevails, or to put it in his own terms, ‘a certain climate of experience’.”(Geeti Sen, “La Forge: The Furnace”, Bindu: Space and Time in Raza’s Vision, New Delhi: Media Transasia Limited, 1997, p. 76)

This shift to a more fluid and dynamic style of painting closely followed Raza’s 1962 visit to the United States where he spent several months teaching at the University of California’s Berkeley campus and later in New York on a Rockefeller Foundation fellowship. He was inspired by the creativity, freedom, and immediacy of expression of Abstract Expressionists such Willem de Kooning, Sam Francis, Hans Hofmann, Jackson Pollock, and Mark Rothko whose works he encountered during this time. Reflecting on the impact of this period, he recalled, “Day and night, summer and winter, joy and anguish-these elementary experiences that are felt rather than seen, became my subjects. They were expressed through emotive colours and forms which became increasingly more gestural.” (Artist quoted in Sen, p. 59)

Hofmann’s influence is particularly evident in the present lot, as seen in the fleeting forms and contrast between translucent light and dark masses. As Yashodhara Dalmia notes, “Hofmann’s belief that the two dimensionality of the paint surface creates another reality on canvas and that its spiritual values are awakened by the use of colour, echoed Raza’s own beliefs. Hofmann states, ‘In fact, the whole world as we experience it visually, comes to us through the mystic realm of colour. Our entire being is nourished by it. This mystic quality of colour should likewise find expression in a work of art.’ The emotive qualities of colours in Indian art was not new and this would find a resonance in Raza.” (Yashodhara Dalmia, “The Watershed Years”, Sayed Haider Raza: The Journey of an Iconic Artist, Noida: HarperCollins, 2021, p. 134)

Although Raza had made France his home, his ties to India remained deep and enduring and continued to influence his art as his connection to his Indian identity grew stronger over time. He returned to his home state of Madhya Pradesh in 1959, revisiting the village in which he had grown up, and made another trip in 1962, a few years before the present lot was made. Art historian Geeti Sen observes that his Indian sensibility was what set his gestural expressionism apart and is the most palpable in his colour palette. Titled La Terre, meaning The Earth, the present lot evokes the nurturing presence of mother earth through its rich, glowing tones of gold and brown. The painting also conjures flickering glimpses of light filtering through a forest at twilight, suggesting a conscious or perhaps subconscious recollection of the stark, hallucinatory contrast between night and day, typical of the dense forests of the artist’s childhood. Critic Jacques Lassaigne described this experience as a duality between the oppression of night which is followed by the serenity of day. But Sen notes, “...there is more-there is a severe disjuncture between both time and place which haunts him now, giving birth to a series of “double images”. His gestural treatment inducts the layering of raw emotions, expressed through colours and through images which seem ephemeral-as fleeting emotions of forms resurrected from the past.” (Sen, “Ma: The Motherland”, p. 88)

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