Important Notice

S H Raza’s artistic practice was driven by the pursuit of “significant form”, a term coined by British critic Clive Bell in his 1914 book Art, which he describes as the arrangement of lines and colours in a manner that elicits an emotional response in the viewer. (Clive Bell, Art, New York: Frederick A. Stokes Company, 1914, p. 12) This quest reaches its pinnacle in the artist’s mature works, such as the present lot. By this time, he had... S H Raza’s artistic practice was driven by the pursuit of “significant form”, a term coined by British critic Clive Bell in his 1914 book Art, which he describes as the arrangement of lines and colours in a manner that elicits an emotional response in the viewer. (Clive Bell, Art, New York: Frederick A. Stokes Company, 1914, p. 12) This quest reaches its pinnacle in the artist’s mature works, such as the present lot. By this time, he had refined a highly concentrated symbolic language of geometric forms, informed by Vedic scripture and Indian philosophy, alongside primary colours to explore the metaphysical aspects of nature and the universe. As Geeti Sen observes, “There is no reference here, as with his earlier work, to a particular village or church, or to the expression of a mood of day or season to a “climate of thought”. Instead he has “abstracted” from nature its essence, its deeper implications for mankind.” (Geeti Sen, “Ankuran: Germination”, Bindu: Space and Time in Raza’s Vision, New Delhi: Media Transasia India Ltd., 1997, p. 27)

In the later years of his career, Raza began increasingly relying on intuition over formal logic to understand the mysteries of the universe. Works like the present lot, “constitute a luminous return across the terrain he has already crossed; yet they also put up signposts where fresh formal discoveries have been made, the manner in which the fluency of line has been broken by crests of pure colour, and where the fullness of the intended symbol has been interrupted by a pictorial device, so that we, the viewers, must work to complete the image, instead of merely conducting ourselves as passive recipients.” (Ranjit Hoskote, “The Cartographer of Lost Continents: Thoughts on S. H. Raza’s Art”, Ashok Vajpeyi ed., Yet Again ‒ Nine New Essays on Raza, Kolkata: Akar Prakar, The Raza Foundation, Mapin Publishing, 2015, p. 11)

His symbolic use of colour to elicit an emotion or sensation recalls the influence of Abstract Expressionists, such as Mark Rothko, whose works he encountered on a teaching assignment at the University of California in 1962. They prompted a shift in his own art, allowing colour and texture to take precedence over construction. Yet it also strongly indicates his deep connection to his Indian roots. In the present lot, he pays homage to one of the five primary elements of nature—jal or water—evoked through a brilliant gradient of blues and horizontal lines.

The lower half of the work is inscribed with the lines “Jyōṁ jyōṁ ḍūbat shyām mēṁ tyōṁ tyōṁ ujjwal hōy”, which translates to “As one sinks deeper into night, the purer and brighter one becomes.” These words are a version of a devotional couplet by 17th‒century Ritikal poet Bihari Lal, referring to the Hindu god Krishna, who is also sometimes called Shyam because of his deep blue complexion. Lal suggests that as a devotee’s heart sinks deeper into the love and devotion of Krishna (Shyam), it gets cleansed of worldly impurities and shines brighter with spiritual purity (ujjwal). Raza, who had a lifelong interest in Hindi, Urdu, and French poetry, draws on conventions from the Ragamala style of classical Indian miniature painting where lines from a particular raga were inscribed on a painting to describe the mood or sentiment the composition was meant to convey. Sen remarks, “Raza assumes two roles: he is both listener and singer, viewer and artist. He is the rasika who hears the melody and observes the colours, and is then himself transformed!” (Sen, “Ma: The Motherland”, p. 102)

Raza thus offers multiple threads of interpretation, leaving the viewer to unravel their connections. As he explained, “My understanding is that essentially the force of the words that I use on a painting, write on a painting, is very carefully designed and integrated into the painting in a formal order… But at its origin it may be a different idea… after experiments of many years in the domain of lyrical abstraction, paintings which I did were expressions in colour beyond the subject matter… my paintings do evoke themes… only suggesting and exploring.” (Artist quoted in Ashok Vajpeyi, “The Vision”, A Life in Art: Raza, New Delhi: Art Alive Gallery, 2007, p. 107)

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