S.H. Raza
Encyclopedia
Syed Haider Raza Alias S.H. Raza (born 22 February 1922) is an eminent India
n artist who has lived and worked in France
since 1950, but maintains strong ties with India.
His works are mainly abstracts in oil or acrylic, with a very rich use of color, replete with icons from Indian cosmology as well as its philosophy. He was awarded the Padma Shri
and Fellowship of the Lalit Kala Akademi in 1981 and Padma Bhushan
in 2007.
He became India's priciest modern artist on June 10, 2010 when a seminal work, 'Saurashtra' by the 88-year-old sold for Rs 16.42 crore ($3,486,965) at a Christie's auction.
, Madhya Pradesh
, to Sayed Mohammed Razi, the Deputy Forest Ranger of the district and Tahira Begum, and it was here that he spent his early years and took to drawing at age 12; before moving to Damoh
also in Madhya Pradesh
at 13, where he completed his school education from Government High School, Damoh.
After his high school, he studied further at the Nagpur School of Art, Nagpur
(1939–43), followed by Sir J. J. School of Art
, Bombay (1943–47), before moving to France in October 1950 to study at the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts
(ENSB-A) in Paris
, 1950-1953 on a Govt. of France scholarship. After his studies, he travelled across Europe, and continued to live and exhibit his work in Paris. He was later awarded the Prix de la critique
in Paris in 1956, becoming the first non-French artist to receive the honour.
Salon, and was awarded the Silver Medal of the society.
His work evolved from painting expressionistic landscapes to abstract ones. From his fluent water colours of landscapes and townscapes executed in the early 40's he moved towards a more expressive language painting landscapes of the mind.
1947 proved to be a very important year for him, as first his mother died, and this was also the year when he co-founded the revolutionary Bombay Progressive Artists' Group
(PAG) (1947–1956) along with K.H. Ara and F.N. Souza (Francis Newton Souza
), which set out to break free from the influences of European realism in Indian art and bring Indian inner vision (Antar gyan) into the art, the group had its first show in 1948, the year his father died in Mandla and most of his family of four brothers and a sister migrated to Pakistan, after the partition of India.
Once in France, he continued to experiment with currents of Western Modernism moving from Expressionist modes towards greater abstraction and eventually incorporating elements of Tantrism
from Indian scriptures. Whereas his fellow contemporaries dealt with more figural subjects, Raza chose to focus on landscapes in the 1940s and 50s, inspired in part by a move to the France.
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.
Raza was initially enamored of the bucolic countryside of rural France. Eglise is part of a series which captures the rolling terrain and quaint village architecture of this region. Showing a tumultuous church engulfed by an inky blue night sky, Raza uses gestural brushstrokes and a heavily impasto-ed application of paint, stylistic devices which hint at his later 1970s abstractions.
- Ellora, followed by those Benaras, Gujarat and Rajasthan, made him realise his roots and study Indian culture more closely, the result was 'Bindu
', which signified his rebirth as a painter. The Bindu came forth in 1980, and took his work deeper and brought in, his new-found Indian vision and Indian ethnography. One of the reasons he attributes to the origin of the 'Bindu', have been his elementary school teacher, who on finding him lacking adequate concentration, drew a dot on the blackboard and asked him to concentrate on it.
After the introduction of 'Bindu' (a point or the source of energy), he added newer dimensions to his thematic oeuvre in the following decades, with the inclusion of themes around the Tribhuj (Triangle), which bolstered Indian concepts of space and time, as well as that of 'prakriti-purusha
' (the female and the male energy), his transformation from a expressionist to a master of abstraction and profundity, was complete.
The unique energy vibrating with colour in his early landscapes are now more subtle but equally, if not more, dynamic. Raza abandoned the expressionistic landscape for a geometric abstraction and the 'Bindu'. Raza perceives the Bindu as the center of creation and existence progressing towards forms and colour as well as energy, sound, space and time.
His work took another leap in 2000, when he began to express his increasingly deepened insights and thoughts on Indian spiritual, and created works around the Kundalini
, Nagas and the Mahabharat.
Raza’s runes: visions of the self
By Swapna Vora
(click on the small image for full screen image with captions.)
Sayed Haider Raza’s paintings with herringbone triangles, blue moons, licks of flame and inner vistas trigger transcendental experiences. India’s beloved Raza was born in central India and grew up among forests. Madhya Pradesh is far from the sea, it has hills, but not great mountains, and most of all it has had tribal princes and long waves of peace. As a child, Raza must have seen nocturnal wild creatures padding softly and dark birds flitting through damp jungles and dry forests and his early work was mainly landscapes. It was later, much later, that his handprint, or dare I say, pugmark became the ‘bindu’. Bindu is the sparkling, infinitesimal dot, the spark, the blue pearl from which worlds, (and Raza’s universe), unfurl and into which they curl back. And from bindu, says Hindu religious thought, came energy and time and space, perhaps the first light followed by the first sound.
Hindus often use the bindu to assist concentration and Raza too, as a child, was asked by his teacher to look at a dot on a wall. This helped the child’s distracted mind and presumably he never forgot its impact. Great discerning minds and creative talent want to know things, they feel ideas, taste cool voyages and touch spirit. They say softly to themselves: Where did I come from, will I, someday, know what this was all about? Indians often ponder: Is this all there is to life? How does one measure magic, alchemy? How does one tell tales of contemplation, of silence?
Raza seems to be on this quest, introspective and ultimately joyful for the hero’s quest is always for permanent bliss. His work represents the origins of life and symbols which tribal painters and highly sophisticated Indian philosophers have drawn, pondered and mulled over for millennia. His works resonate like modern tantric tankhas, inducing wonder, joy and meditation in the viewer. For me, this is not mere peace but vibration, the throb, the spanda and a peaceful, grateful homecoming to Kashmiri Shiv darshan, a glimpse of Shiv in the triangles, the points, the ascent and descent of grace. Yes, there are miracles of creation, destruction, preservation, everyone knows those. The other two miracles that Raza has are control and grace. All we can be assured of is that there is a still small point which begins and ends and begins again and which will ‘Breathe through the heat of our desire, … speak through the earthquake, wind and fire, oh, still small voice of calm’. Yes, seeing his work in silence, makes me want to bow my head and pray and slowly experience other vibrations, other dimensions. Small irregular temples, with darkened holy of holies, made long before there were religions, should hold his paintings. Perhaps these are the earliest symbols: triangles, man-woman, god, grace from man to God and back again, the six pointed stars, the vishuddh chakra. These ongoing depictions of reality streaming from Raza, need new and not so new temples, with scrolls for contemplation, and walls of carefully painted blues in flames for they induce a joyous peace and insight, when all is well and there are no more words. Rather than in a rich home, a far off cold gallery, his work would be best, to my mind, in a stone temple for us to contemplate and return peacefully downhill from a yatra, a pilgrimage. In the beginning was the dot, the unspoken sound, the unfelt, unseen vibration and we, the gods, began in a spot of light, and evolved into this wondrous universe and ended back in a dot of dust, a sparkling silence.
A journey which all of us take, sometimes with a talisman, sometimes fearful and alone, and sometimes tranquil and contemplative. Like the Magi, like SH Raza.
His Indian canvases and the early French ones were realistic, like the visible world, resembling what most of us see daily. Later he saw and painted the bindu and still later entered a white period. His primary colors of fire and the sea are the color of outer space, dark blue and yellow wherever light has become matter. Like most Indian travelers, Raza moves comfortably and familiarly between east and west, for we tend to see most other places simply as extensions of our home and ourselves.
Raza's "Cityscape" (1946) and "Baramulla in Ruins" (1948) show his sorrow and anguish over the partition of Hindustan and the suffering of Muslims in Mumbai during the riots. To be a minority, to be vulnerable and watchful, is something many the world over live with daily. Raza’s painting show towns bereft of people, voids populated by buildings and no bird sings. Lonely cityscapes, peopled perhaps by ghosts, soundlessly ask dead skeletons: Tell me now, are you still a Muslim? Are you still a Hindu?
He has spoken of our collective anguish during and after Partition, "On the one side there was a national tragedy. As personal history for my family, these critical years of 1947 to 1948 were those of tragedy and separation. In July 1947 my mother passed away in my house in Bombay; early in the next year in 1948, my father died in Mandla. Linked with this period of riots and killings and hatred there was my private history and my personal sense of loss." (quoted from Geeti Sen in Bindu, Space and Time in Raza's Vision). His paintings of Paris "Black Sun" (1953), "Haut de Cagnes" (1951) have close clusters of homes and workplaces, hot, uncomfortable and lonely. France taught him techniques and gave him space. However his work is, was and continues to be remains distinctly Indian.
His new works over the years, show the spirit’s lunar and solarscape, the eternal round, the spots, triangles and induce contemplation, serenity, tongues of flame. Always one knows, remembers pralaya, and that everyday is perhaps judgment day.
Syed Haider Raza’s art was rooted in the twenties, a time when Hindustan had been colonized, was totally impoverished and people yearned for freedom. Artists were tired of being told that Victorian ways and the Slade school were the correct path for them. With tribal symbols, dreams of Paris, philosophies of freedom and colors, Raza and others in the Progressive Arts Group shuffled off colonial gallows and gave birth to modern Indian art. Ancient techniques and symbols, scorned by the British, were once again surfacing and shaping India’s artists. France was valued as a teacher of technique.
S H Raza travels to India regularly to remember and drink again India and its life, its many lives. For most Indians, mainstream Hindu ideas and Muslim beliefs are everyday aspects of faith and reality, one is not alien to the other. Hence Muslims like Raza, Husain, Ghulam Rasool Santosh use Hindu symbols fluently and naturally, it is what they experienced daily. There are no strangers here or foreign issues, simply shared knowledge.
Raza spent one summer teaching in California and saw the lively delight of Pollack and the mysterious works of Rothko. However one searches in vain for any discernible influence.
He goes on the human’s heroic quest: why am I here, where am I going, why, what is this amazing thing called awareness, consciousness. If we hang around, will we somehow learn what it was all about? Raza paints the Bindu as the birth and sustainer of creation and existence and moves towards shapes, geometry and colour and onto two dimensional depictions of space, sound and time.
Quotes:
"My inspiration has been the ideas of writers or painters and even musicians such as the Ustad who said, 'See with your ears, hear with your eyes.' -Sayed Haider Raza
"My work is my own inner experience and involvement with the mysteries of nature and form which is expressed in colour, line, space and light".
"The quest of the essential obsessed me. The revelation of Indian concepts, iconography, signs and symbols fortified the search. Nature as 'Prakriti', the supreme generating force, the embryonic energy contained in the seed, the male-female polarity, the ever present phenomena in Nature - germination, gestation and birth - transformed my concept of 'nature-seen' to 'nature-imagined".
"I went to France because that country taught me the technique and science of painting. The immortal artists of France like Cézanne knew the secret of the construction of a painting…. But despite my French experience, the substance of my paintings comes straight from India."
Notes: Sotheby’s Mar. 29 sold Indian and Southeast Asian art for $13,633,820 with mostly modern Indian art. Tapovan, (1972) by Sayed Haider Raza (b. 1922), sold for $1,472,000. In December 1978, the Madhya Pradesh Government, India, paid him special and grateful homage and now houses a permanent collection in Bhopal.
r656 585ytuytuytutyyutrddr6
(French and English Edition. Lithographs http://www.ladifference.fr/estampes.html edited by Éditions de la Différence, Paris)
India
India , officially the Republic of India , is a country in South Asia. It is the seventh-largest country by geographical area, the second-most populous country with over 1.2 billion people, and the most populous democracy in the world...
n artist who has lived and worked in France
France
The French Republic , The French Republic , The French Republic , (commonly known as France , is a unitary semi-presidential republic in Western Europe with several overseas territories and islands located on other continents and in the Indian, Pacific, and Atlantic oceans. Metropolitan France...
since 1950, but maintains strong ties with India.
His works are mainly abstracts in oil or acrylic, with a very rich use of color, replete with icons from Indian cosmology as well as its philosophy. He was awarded the Padma Shri
Padma Shri
Padma Shri is the fourth highest civilian award in the Republic of India, after the Bharat Ratna, the Padma Vibhushan and the Padma Bhushan...
and Fellowship of the Lalit Kala Akademi in 1981 and Padma Bhushan
Padma Bhushan
The Padma Bhushan is the third highest civilian award in the Republic of India, after the Bharat Ratna and the Padma Vibhushan, but comes before the Padma Shri. It is awarded by the Government of India.-History:...
in 2007.
He became India's priciest modern artist on June 10, 2010 when a seminal work, 'Saurashtra' by the 88-year-old sold for Rs 16.42 crore ($3,486,965) at a Christie's auction.
Early life and education
Syed Haider Raza was born in Babaria, Mandla districtMandla District
Mandla District is a district of Madhya Pradesh state in central India. The town of Mandla is administrative headquarters of the district. It is part of Jabalpur Division....
, Madhya Pradesh
Madhya Pradesh
Madhya Pradesh , often called the Heart of India, is a state in central India. Its capital is Bhopal and Indore is the largest city....
, to Sayed Mohammed Razi, the Deputy Forest Ranger of the district and Tahira Begum, and it was here that he spent his early years and took to drawing at age 12; before moving to Damoh
Damoh
Damoh is a city in the Sagar Division of northeast Madhya Pradesh in India, east of state capital Bhopal and in north by Tikamgarh. It is the administrative headquarters of Damoh District.-Geography:...
also in Madhya Pradesh
Madhya Pradesh
Madhya Pradesh , often called the Heart of India, is a state in central India. Its capital is Bhopal and Indore is the largest city....
at 13, where he completed his school education from Government High School, Damoh.
After his high school, he studied further at the Nagpur School of Art, Nagpur
Nagpur
Nāgpur is a city and winter capital of the state of Maharashtra, the largest city in central India and third largest city in Maharashtra after Mumbai and Pune...
(1939–43), followed by Sir J. J. School of Art
Sir J. J. School of Art
The Sir Jamsetjee Jeejeebhoy School of Art , is the oldest art institution in Mumbai, and is affiliated with the University of Mumbai...
, Bombay (1943–47), before moving to France in October 1950 to study at the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts
École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts
The École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-arts is the distinguished National School of Fine Arts in Paris, France.The École des Beaux-arts is made up of a vast complex of buildings located at 14 rue Bonaparte, between the quai Malaquais and the rue Bonaparte, in the heart of Saint-Germain-des-Près,...
(ENSB-A) in Paris
Paris
Paris is the capital and largest city in France, situated on the river Seine, in northern France, at the heart of the Île-de-France region...
, 1950-1953 on a Govt. of France scholarship. After his studies, he travelled across Europe, and continued to live and exhibit his work in Paris. He was later awarded the Prix de la critique
Prix de la critique
The Prix de la critique is a prize awarded by the Association des Critiques et des journalistes de Bande Dessinée to the best comic album released for a year in France. Previously, from 1984 to 2003, it was called Prix Bloody Mary and awarded at the Angoulême International Comics Festival...
in Paris in 1956, becoming the first non-French artist to receive the honour.
Early career
Syed Haider Raza, has his first solo show in 1946 at Bombay Art SocietyBombay Art Society
The Bombay Art Society is an arts organisation based in Mumbai that was founded in 1888. Current President of the Society is Prafulla Dahanukar who was elected on 15th May 2010....
Salon, and was awarded the Silver Medal of the society.
His work evolved from painting expressionistic landscapes to abstract ones. From his fluent water colours of landscapes and townscapes executed in the early 40's he moved towards a more expressive language painting landscapes of the mind.
1947 proved to be a very important year for him, as first his mother died, and this was also the year when he co-founded the revolutionary Bombay Progressive Artists' Group
Bombay Progressive Artists' Group
The Bombay Progressive Artists' Group was the most influential group of modern artists in India from its formation in 1947, they combined Indian subject matter with Post-Impressionist colours, Cubist forms and brusque, Expressionistic styles....
(PAG) (1947–1956) along with K.H. Ara and F.N. Souza (Francis Newton Souza
Francis Newton Souza
Francis Newton Souza , commonly referred to as F. N. Souza, was an Indian artist. He was a founding member of the Progressive Artists' Group of Bombay, and was the first post-independence Indian artist to achieve high recognition in the West...
), which set out to break free from the influences of European realism in Indian art and bring Indian inner vision (Antar gyan) into the art, the group had its first show in 1948, the year his father died in Mandla and most of his family of four brothers and a sister migrated to Pakistan, after the partition of India.
Once in France, he continued to experiment with currents of Western Modernism moving from Expressionist modes towards greater abstraction and eventually incorporating elements of Tantrism
Tantra
Tantra , anglicised tantricism or tantrism or tantram, is the name scholars give to an inter-religious spiritual movement that arose in medieval India, expressed in scriptures ....
from Indian scriptures. Whereas his fellow contemporaries dealt with more figural subjects, Raza chose to focus on landscapes in the 1940s and 50s, inspired in part by a move to the France.
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.
Raza was initially enamored of the bucolic countryside of rural France. Eglise is part of a series which captures the rolling terrain and quaint village architecture of this region. Showing a tumultuous church engulfed by an inky blue night sky, Raza uses gestural brushstrokes and a heavily impasto-ed application of paint, stylistic devices which hint at his later 1970s abstractions.
The 'Bindu' and beyond
By the 1970s Raza had grown increasingly unhappy and restless with his own work and wanted to find a new direction and deeper authenticity in his work, and move away from what he called the 'plastic art'. His trips to India, especially to caves of AjantaAjanta
The Ajanta Caves in Aurangabad district of Maharashtra, India are 29 rock-cut cave monuments which date from the 2nd century BCE. The caves include paintings and sculptures considered to be masterpieces of both Buddhist religious art as well as frescos which are reminiscent of the Sigiriya...
- Ellora, followed by those Benaras, Gujarat and Rajasthan, made him realise his roots and study Indian culture more closely, the result was 'Bindu
Bindu
Bindu is a Sanskrit term meaning "point" or "dot". The feminine case ending is bindi which denotes a small ornamental, devotional and/or mystical dot that is cosmetically applied or affixed to the forehead in Hinduism....
', which signified his rebirth as a painter. The Bindu came forth in 1980, and took his work deeper and brought in, his new-found Indian vision and Indian ethnography. One of the reasons he attributes to the origin of the 'Bindu', have been his elementary school teacher, who on finding him lacking adequate concentration, drew a dot on the blackboard and asked him to concentrate on it.
After the introduction of 'Bindu' (a point or the source of energy), he added newer dimensions to his thematic oeuvre in the following decades, with the inclusion of themes around the Tribhuj (Triangle), which bolstered Indian concepts of space and time, as well as that of 'prakriti-purusha
Purusha
In some lineages of Hinduism, Purusha is the "Self" which pervades the universe. The Vedic divinities are interpretations of the many facets of Purusha...
' (the female and the male energy), his transformation from a expressionist to a master of abstraction and profundity, was complete.
The unique energy vibrating with colour in his early landscapes are now more subtle but equally, if not more, dynamic. Raza abandoned the expressionistic landscape for a geometric abstraction and the 'Bindu'. Raza perceives the Bindu as the center of creation and existence progressing towards forms and colour as well as energy, sound, space and time.
His work took another leap in 2000, when he began to express his increasingly deepened insights and thoughts on Indian spiritual, and created works around the Kundalini
Kundalini
Kundalini literally means coiled. In yoga, a "corporeal energy" - an unconscious, instinctive or libidinal force or Shakti, lies coiled at the base of the spine. It is envisioned either as a goddess or else as a sleeping serpent, hence a number of English renderings of the term such as 'serpent...
, Nagas and the Mahabharat.
Raza’s runes: visions of the self
By Swapna Vora
(click on the small image for full screen image with captions.)
Sayed Haider Raza’s paintings with herringbone triangles, blue moons, licks of flame and inner vistas trigger transcendental experiences. India’s beloved Raza was born in central India and grew up among forests. Madhya Pradesh is far from the sea, it has hills, but not great mountains, and most of all it has had tribal princes and long waves of peace. As a child, Raza must have seen nocturnal wild creatures padding softly and dark birds flitting through damp jungles and dry forests and his early work was mainly landscapes. It was later, much later, that his handprint, or dare I say, pugmark became the ‘bindu’. Bindu is the sparkling, infinitesimal dot, the spark, the blue pearl from which worlds, (and Raza’s universe), unfurl and into which they curl back. And from bindu, says Hindu religious thought, came energy and time and space, perhaps the first light followed by the first sound.
Hindus often use the bindu to assist concentration and Raza too, as a child, was asked by his teacher to look at a dot on a wall. This helped the child’s distracted mind and presumably he never forgot its impact. Great discerning minds and creative talent want to know things, they feel ideas, taste cool voyages and touch spirit. They say softly to themselves: Where did I come from, will I, someday, know what this was all about? Indians often ponder: Is this all there is to life? How does one measure magic, alchemy? How does one tell tales of contemplation, of silence?
Raza seems to be on this quest, introspective and ultimately joyful for the hero’s quest is always for permanent bliss. His work represents the origins of life and symbols which tribal painters and highly sophisticated Indian philosophers have drawn, pondered and mulled over for millennia. His works resonate like modern tantric tankhas, inducing wonder, joy and meditation in the viewer. For me, this is not mere peace but vibration, the throb, the spanda and a peaceful, grateful homecoming to Kashmiri Shiv darshan, a glimpse of Shiv in the triangles, the points, the ascent and descent of grace. Yes, there are miracles of creation, destruction, preservation, everyone knows those. The other two miracles that Raza has are control and grace. All we can be assured of is that there is a still small point which begins and ends and begins again and which will ‘Breathe through the heat of our desire, … speak through the earthquake, wind and fire, oh, still small voice of calm’. Yes, seeing his work in silence, makes me want to bow my head and pray and slowly experience other vibrations, other dimensions. Small irregular temples, with darkened holy of holies, made long before there were religions, should hold his paintings. Perhaps these are the earliest symbols: triangles, man-woman, god, grace from man to God and back again, the six pointed stars, the vishuddh chakra. These ongoing depictions of reality streaming from Raza, need new and not so new temples, with scrolls for contemplation, and walls of carefully painted blues in flames for they induce a joyous peace and insight, when all is well and there are no more words. Rather than in a rich home, a far off cold gallery, his work would be best, to my mind, in a stone temple for us to contemplate and return peacefully downhill from a yatra, a pilgrimage. In the beginning was the dot, the unspoken sound, the unfelt, unseen vibration and we, the gods, began in a spot of light, and evolved into this wondrous universe and ended back in a dot of dust, a sparkling silence.
A journey which all of us take, sometimes with a talisman, sometimes fearful and alone, and sometimes tranquil and contemplative. Like the Magi, like SH Raza.
His Indian canvases and the early French ones were realistic, like the visible world, resembling what most of us see daily. Later he saw and painted the bindu and still later entered a white period. His primary colors of fire and the sea are the color of outer space, dark blue and yellow wherever light has become matter. Like most Indian travelers, Raza moves comfortably and familiarly between east and west, for we tend to see most other places simply as extensions of our home and ourselves.
Raza's "Cityscape" (1946) and "Baramulla in Ruins" (1948) show his sorrow and anguish over the partition of Hindustan and the suffering of Muslims in Mumbai during the riots. To be a minority, to be vulnerable and watchful, is something many the world over live with daily. Raza’s painting show towns bereft of people, voids populated by buildings and no bird sings. Lonely cityscapes, peopled perhaps by ghosts, soundlessly ask dead skeletons: Tell me now, are you still a Muslim? Are you still a Hindu?
He has spoken of our collective anguish during and after Partition, "On the one side there was a national tragedy. As personal history for my family, these critical years of 1947 to 1948 were those of tragedy and separation. In July 1947 my mother passed away in my house in Bombay; early in the next year in 1948, my father died in Mandla. Linked with this period of riots and killings and hatred there was my private history and my personal sense of loss." (quoted from Geeti Sen in Bindu, Space and Time in Raza's Vision). His paintings of Paris "Black Sun" (1953), "Haut de Cagnes" (1951) have close clusters of homes and workplaces, hot, uncomfortable and lonely. France taught him techniques and gave him space. However his work is, was and continues to be remains distinctly Indian.
His new works over the years, show the spirit’s lunar and solarscape, the eternal round, the spots, triangles and induce contemplation, serenity, tongues of flame. Always one knows, remembers pralaya, and that everyday is perhaps judgment day.
Syed Haider Raza’s art was rooted in the twenties, a time when Hindustan had been colonized, was totally impoverished and people yearned for freedom. Artists were tired of being told that Victorian ways and the Slade school were the correct path for them. With tribal symbols, dreams of Paris, philosophies of freedom and colors, Raza and others in the Progressive Arts Group shuffled off colonial gallows and gave birth to modern Indian art. Ancient techniques and symbols, scorned by the British, were once again surfacing and shaping India’s artists. France was valued as a teacher of technique.
S H Raza travels to India regularly to remember and drink again India and its life, its many lives. For most Indians, mainstream Hindu ideas and Muslim beliefs are everyday aspects of faith and reality, one is not alien to the other. Hence Muslims like Raza, Husain, Ghulam Rasool Santosh use Hindu symbols fluently and naturally, it is what they experienced daily. There are no strangers here or foreign issues, simply shared knowledge.
Raza spent one summer teaching in California and saw the lively delight of Pollack and the mysterious works of Rothko. However one searches in vain for any discernible influence.
He goes on the human’s heroic quest: why am I here, where am I going, why, what is this amazing thing called awareness, consciousness. If we hang around, will we somehow learn what it was all about? Raza paints the Bindu as the birth and sustainer of creation and existence and moves towards shapes, geometry and colour and onto two dimensional depictions of space, sound and time.
Quotes:
"My inspiration has been the ideas of writers or painters and even musicians such as the Ustad who said, 'See with your ears, hear with your eyes.' -Sayed Haider Raza
"My work is my own inner experience and involvement with the mysteries of nature and form which is expressed in colour, line, space and light".
"The quest of the essential obsessed me. The revelation of Indian concepts, iconography, signs and symbols fortified the search. Nature as 'Prakriti', the supreme generating force, the embryonic energy contained in the seed, the male-female polarity, the ever present phenomena in Nature - germination, gestation and birth - transformed my concept of 'nature-seen' to 'nature-imagined".
"I went to France because that country taught me the technique and science of painting. The immortal artists of France like Cézanne knew the secret of the construction of a painting…. But despite my French experience, the substance of my paintings comes straight from India."
Notes: Sotheby’s Mar. 29 sold Indian and Southeast Asian art for $13,633,820 with mostly modern Indian art. Tapovan, (1972) by Sayed Haider Raza (b. 1922), sold for $1,472,000. In December 1978, the Madhya Pradesh Government, India, paid him special and grateful homage and now houses a permanent collection in Bhopal.
r656 585ytuytuytutyyutrddr6
Public contributions
He has also founded 'Raza Foundation' in India, promotion of art among Indian youth, which also gives away, Annual Raza Foundation Award, to young artists.Personal life
S. H. Raza married Janine Mongillat, his fellow student at Ecole de Beaux Arts in Paris and later became a well-known artist and sculptor. They married in 1959, and at the request of her mother not to leave France, Raza chose to remain. Janine died on April 5, 2002 in Paris.Awards
- 1946: Silver Medal, Bombay Art SocietyBombay Art SocietyThe Bombay Art Society is an arts organisation based in Mumbai that was founded in 1888. Current President of the Society is Prafulla Dahanukar who was elected on 15th May 2010....
, Mumbai - 1948: Gold Medal, Bombay Art SocietyBombay Art SocietyThe Bombay Art Society is an arts organisation based in Mumbai that was founded in 1888. Current President of the Society is Prafulla Dahanukar who was elected on 15th May 2010....
, Mumbai - 1956: Prix de la critiquePrix de la critiqueThe Prix de la critique is a prize awarded by the Association des Critiques et des journalistes de Bande Dessinée to the best comic album released for a year in France. Previously, from 1984 to 2003, it was called Prix Bloody Mary and awarded at the Angoulême International Comics Festival...
, Paris - 1981: Padma ShriPadma ShriPadma Shri is the fourth highest civilian award in the Republic of India, after the Bharat Ratna, the Padma Vibhushan and the Padma Bhushan...
; the Government of India - 1981: Fellowship of the Lalit Kala Akademi, New Delhi
- 1981: Kalidas SammanKalidas sammanThe Kalidas Samman is a prestigious arts award presented annually by the government of Madhya Pradesh in India. The award is named after Kālidāsa, a renowned Classical Sanskrit writer of ancient India, widely regarded as the greatest poet and dramatist in the Sanskrit language.The Kalidas Samman...
, Government of Madhya PradeshMadhya PradeshMadhya Pradesh , often called the Heart of India, is a state in central India. Its capital is Bhopal and Indore is the largest city.... - 2007: Padma BhushanPadma BhushanThe Padma Bhushan is the third highest civilian award in the Republic of India, after the Bharat Ratna and the Padma Vibhushan, but comes before the Padma Shri. It is awarded by the Government of India.-History:...
; the Government of India
Exhibitions
- 2010 Flora Jansem Gallery, Raza Ceramiques, Paris
- 2010 Akar Prakar Art Gallery,Kolkata, Ahmadabad, Jaipur INDIA in 2010
- 2008 Art Alive Gallery, Delhi, INDIA in 2008
- View Exhibition Magnificent Seven at Art Alive Gallery
- 1997 Roopankar Museum of Fine Arts, Bharat Bhavan, Bhopal
- 1997 Jehangir Art Gallery Mumbai
- 1997 National Gallery of Modern Art, New Delhi.
- 1994 The Art Rental Corporate, Group Michael Ferrier, Échirolles, Grenoble
- 1992 Jehangir Nicholson Museum, National Centre for Performing Arts, Mumbai
- 1992 Courses Arts Lalouvesc, France
- 1991 Gallery Eterso, Cannes Retrospective: 1952-91, Palazzo Carnoles
- 1991 Museum of Menton, France
- 1990 Chemould Gallery, Bombay
- 1988 Chemould Gallery, Bombay; Koloritten Galleri, Stavanger, Norway
- 1987 The Head of the artist, Grenoble
- 1985 Galerie Pierre Parat, Paris
- 1984 Chemould Gallery, Bombay
- 1982 Gallery Loeb, Bern, Switzerland; Gallery JY Noblet, Grenoble
- 1980 Galleriet, Oslo
Further reading
- Passion: Life and Art of Raza, by Sayed Haider Raza, Ashok Vajpeyi (Ed.). 2005, Rajkamal Books. ISBN 8126710403.
- Raza: A Life in Art, by Ashok Vajpeyi, 2007, Art Alive Gallery, New Delhi. ISBN 978-81-901844-4-1.
- Bindu: Space and time in Raza's vision, by Geeti Sen. Media Transasia, 1997. ISBN 9627024066.
- Razahttp://www.ladifference.fr/raza,1780.html?indextitre=4&titre=R#livre1780, by Alain Bonfand, Les Éditions de la Différence, Paris, 2008.
(French and English Edition. Lithographs http://www.ladifference.fr/estampes.html edited by Éditions de la Différence, Paris)