S.H. Raza: The Burning Landscape

The year 1950 would be a defining moment for the artist Sayed Haider Raza in more ways than one. In leaving for Paris, not only was his painterly expression to acquire great transformations but it was also to lead to an acquaintance with his French artist wife, Janine Mongillat, and a subsequent stay in the city for several decades which would catapult him to the international art world and society. The young artist who had left the shores of Mumbai with little to equip him was to reach the peak of his achievement here where his work acquired a magnetic presence. For Raza, Paris had given him le sens plastique, the sense of the painterly surface and its plastic components in form and color. “I recall to have cried in front of the portrait of Van Gogh. Cezanne led me away from the emotive approach to the rational approach in art.” (S.H. Raza quoted in Itinerary Carnets series, New Delhi, 2015) The empowering of his painterly armament would lead not only to powerful expression but forefront him as a formidable votary of modern art in India.

12 February 2018