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Lot Essay
Syed Haider Raza arrived in France in October 1950 to attend the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts. The artist recollects excitedly absorbing the thriving local art scene on his arrival, and visiting several exhibitions and museums. "I was moving from discovery to discovery [...] Paris offered me museums, exhibitions, libraries, theatre, ballet, films – in short, a living culture! […] France gave me 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 proportion in form and structure. Lastly, France has given me a sense of savior vivre: the ability to perceive and to follow a certain discerning quality in life.” (Artist statement, G. Sen, Bindu: Space and Time in Raza's Vision, New Delhi, 1997, pp. 55-57)
On the advice of renowned photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson, Raza began to focus on the pictorial compositions and structures of Cézanne. He was influenced both by the palette and composition of the Post-Impressionist paintings that he saw, and by his early experiences of living in Paris and travelling through the bucolic French countryside. Painted in 1956, this work represents a seminal period of intense experimentation in Raza's oeuvre, during which he began to move away from watercolour, instead combining ink with gouache and oil to create a more tactile composition that would more closely evoke his experience of the landscape.
Rudolf von Leyden noted that it was also at this moment in the 1950s that, "Byzantine painting, Romanesque sculpture and the Italian primitives appealed to [Raza] 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)
On the advice of renowned photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson, Raza began to focus on the pictorial compositions and structures of Cézanne. He was influenced both by the palette and composition of the Post-Impressionist paintings that he saw, and by his early experiences of living in Paris and travelling through the bucolic French countryside. Painted in 1956, this work represents a seminal period of intense experimentation in Raza's oeuvre, during which he began to move away from watercolour, instead combining ink with gouache and oil to create a more tactile composition that would more closely evoke his experience of the landscape.
Rudolf von Leyden noted that it was also at this moment in the 1950s that, "Byzantine painting, Romanesque sculpture and the Italian primitives appealed to [Raza] 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)