He holds the record for the most expensive Indian artwork ever sold, but Raza’s artistic journey has been a long and solitary one
Paul Cézanne—who both Matisse and Picasso referred to as “the father of us all"—painted the Sainte-Victoire mountain from the window of his house in Aix-en-Provence in the south of France over 60 times. Cézanne had stated his aim to organize nature according to geometric forms: He was painting the Sainte-Victoire in long-views, side-views and close-ups.
With each painting, Cézanne was getting closer to the mountain.
“You must think of the mountain when you’re painting the mountain. Not the trees and the elephants and the horses," says the 89-year-old artist Syed Haider Raza, now wheelchair-bound, recalling how he’d sailed from Mumbai to Paris in 1950, at the age of 28, with a single-minded mission—“to see the works of Cézanne".
