Village Sous La Neige

Syed Haider Raza arrived in France in October 1950 to attend the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts and excitedly recollects absorbing the thriving local scene and eagerly visiting all the museums and soaking it all in. He was greatly influenced by the coloration and composition of the Post-Impressionists. “[...] After arriving in Paris in October 1950, Raza, "[…] As advised by Henri Cartier-Bresson, [...] concentrated his studies on the vision, technique and composition of Cézanne. 'I went to the museum again and again and tried to understand what was construction according to Cézanne. I read the book of Kandinsky Concerning the Spiritual in Art and I studied particularly Cubism in which paintings were very carefully constructed. I also went to the extent of finding out what Mondrian and Vasarely had done with pure geometry and what Nicolas de Stael did to it [...].  Raza also travelled far and wide in France, Italy and Spain. As Rudi Van Leyden has noted, 'it was the art of medieval European and early Renaissance that spoke to him convincingly. Byzantine painting, Romanesque sculpture and the Italian primitives appealed to him in their austerity which was capable of conveying the most exquisite poetic sensitivity [...] So much exposure to a new and different visual culture could have easily caused a 'turbulent confusion'. However, instead Raza was able to attain a degree of order and a new kind of landscape started dominating his work.” (A. Vajpeyi, ed., A Life in Art: S.H. Raza, Hyderabad, 2007, p. 64)