Sayed Haider Raza is one of the most important 20th-century painters in India’s history. Inspired by the forests of Madhya Pradesh, Raza began painting at the tender age of 12. The artist went on to study at the Nagpur School of Art and later, at Mumbai’s Sir JJ School of Art. In 1950, he moved to France to attend the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts on a government scholarship. Raza, after completing his studies, he decided to stay on in France where he was exposed to Western modernism, including American abstraction and expressionist art. In 1956, Raza became the first non-French artist to be awarded the prestigious Prix de la Critique, the same year he heralded India’s representation at the Venice Biennale.

Having already declared admiration for Cézanne, Raza continued his quest to understand French art closely by visiting various museums and reading as much as he could on French literature. He scrutinized the paintings of Cubists like Picasso, and artists like Mondrian and Vasarely. Art historian Yashodhara Dalmia argues that even before he arrived on French shores, the geometric elements that would come to predominate his work were already firmly in place in the work he exhibited at the Institute of Foreign Languages at Outram Road in Bombay. “The houses in a painting like ‘Moonlit Night’ are geometrically arranged and create a pattern of color and shapes. They verge on the abstract where they occupy no specific location or time,” she writes in her chapter “Journeys with the Black Sun” in her 2001 book, The Making of Modern Indian Art, The Progressives.

In 1959, he married French artist, Janine Mongillat, and three years later, in 1962, he became a visiting lecturer at the University of California in Berkeley, USA. He also visited to New York, San Francisco, and the West coast. His works in this period took a turn towards gestural abstraction. Raza spent a good deal of his time visiting and viewing the works of other contemporaries of his time and he found a close affinity between the works of Hans Hofmann and his own ideas.

Colors of India

Raza’s earlier fascination with geometry further developed a new resonance with colour. The philosophical lens towards his art also meant that the 1960s and ‘70s saw Raza approach his craft from the inside out. Now colours in his paintings are a way of expression of his immediate emotions. He began painting in a sensuous approach to nature as it depicted his constant search for the unknown reverberations of nature. The themes of earth, fire, water and air, which became significant in his artistic vocabulary in later years, emerged in these compositions. Raza mediated between earth and sky, and as he evolved, colour started to assume shape, texture, and structure, and the brush strokes became the very foundation for visual significance.

His palette returns to the Indian sensibility, and it establishes an immediate distance from other forms of gestural expressionism. Like the Ragamala paintings of Indian miniature tradition, where artists inscribed the text of the raga they were illustrating, in to the painting, Raza, too, began to include profound Sanskrit chants, snippets of Hindi and Urdu verses on his canvases. Raza started to visit to India regularly in this period. In the late 70s, his sole focus became improvisation of the geometrical forms.

The Bindu and Beyond

It was during his journeys to India later that he reflected on his childhood where his teacher Shri Nand Lalji Jharia had put a dot on the white wall and asked him to meditate on it. In his childhood he didn’t understand the importance of this. But during his visits to India, this lesson haunted him and he saw it as the most. He started meditating on the point in the solitude of his little rooms in Bombay and later in his home in Paris. “And one night in southern France in Gorbio the revelation of the ‘Bindu’ came to his mind as a point of departure. The circle or Bindu now became more of an icon, sacred in its symbolism.

After his visits to India in 1960s and 70s while he lived in France, S.H. Raza shifted his interest back in mapping the terrain and colors of the land of his birth, Madhya Pradesh, India. La Terre, and its variations done over the course of time, tell the tales of Raza’s exploration of the sights of Central India. Here, we see earthy colors of Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan in the scorched reds, yellows, dense browns and black. L’Orage (1975) by S. H. Raza is an homage to his native roots in India.