Page 43 - Iconic Masters October2023

Landscapes

Raza

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The 1950s were an important decade in S.H. Raza’s career as he
became preoccupied with abstract landscapes. In 1950, he moved to
Paris, gaining new insight into art through European artists and also
meeting his wife, French artist Janine Mongillat. He quickly gained
recognition with his work’s transformation as he gained a sense of the
painterly surface. This new sense was inspired by his interest in creating
surfaces that would take on the properties of what they portray.

His works of the time are abstract renditions of the landscapes
of Southern France with churches and medieval houses making a
prominent appearance. Devoid of any human intervention, these
depicted aerial and frontal views of the artist’s imagination of the lush
terrains. The building structures, depicted with bold lines, were utilised
to dissect the planes, making for dynamic paintings.

The raw and intense nature of these works was made evident
through the bold colour palette with black in the backdrop, rusty reds
to symbolise the earth and green to depict vegetation. This primary
palette came from both his time in his hometown in Madhya Pradesh
and his adopted country of France. These works were a seamless
amalgamation of the tones prevalent in Indian traditional art and
the composition of Ecoles de Paris. His reverence for Van Gogh and
Cezanne is also evident in these works, with the emotion he found in
Van Gogh’s oeuvre and the rationality of Cezanne translating into his
own visual language.

This 1950s also marked Raza’s switch to oil painting wherein he used
a palette knife or brush to create thick impastos to recreate his
memories of the landscapes. Earlier, he had been influenced by the
aesthetics of V.S. Gaitonde and other influential artists in Mumbai to
use paper gouache on which colours were applied by rubbing cowrie
shells on the surface, emulating Rajasthani miniature painting.