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拍品专文
Abandoning the recognizable landscapes he painted early in his career as an artist, Sayed Haider Raza’s work took a turn towards gestural abstraction in the mid-1960s, dominated by free-flowing brushwork and pulsating energy. Influenced by the art he encountered during a summer visiting the United States and teaching at the University of California in Berkeley in 1962, these paintings drew from the work of American artists like the Abstract Expressionists Sam Francis, Mark Rothko and Jackson Pollock.
“Rothko’s work opened up lots of interesting associations for me. It was so different from the insipid realism of the European School. It was like a door that opened to another interior vision. Yes, I felt that I was awakening to the music of another forest, one of subliminal energy. Rothko’s works brought back the images of japmala, where the repetition of a word continues till you achieve a state of elevated consciousness [...] Rothko’s works made me understand the feel for spatial perception” (Raza: Celebrating 85 years, exhibition catalogue, New Delhi, 2007, unpaginated).
In the early 1970s, developing this style of painting, Raza’s work began to exhibit an increasingly sophisticated use of brushstroke and palette that denoted location, emotion and spirituality in place of tangible forms. His gestural brushwork was painterly not in the sense of texture, but in further expressing the complex emotions Raza associated with the landscape, particularly that of his childhood home in Central India. “Physical location did not necessarily mean a spiritual and creative dislocation […] For him hereafter art was to be his home, reconstructed through memory, resonance and imagination. It was soon to be also his spiritual haven, a space where he could connect with the infinite, the limitless and the timeless” (A. Vajpeyi, A Life in Art: Raza, New Delhi, 2007, p. 98).
The present lot, part of a small series of works from this period that Raza titled Cantique or song of praise, pays homage to the intertwined nature of the arts, particularly in ancient India, and the equal capacity of painting and music to elevate the spirit. Here, Raza uses energetic brushstrokes and a vivid palette, dominated by shades of green and orange to offer a tribute to the land and its bounty with a painted song of praise in the style that the critic Geeta Kapur dubbed his “rhapsodic nature based abstraction” (G. Kapur, ‘Excerpt from different chapters of Contemporary Indian Artists,’ Understanding Raza: Many Ways of Looking at a Master, New Delhi, p. 172).
Cantique thus represents an important stage of the formal and personal exploration that characterized Raza’s artistic practice across the arc of his eight decade long career. With a renewed interest in his Indian heritage and the potential for introspection and the achievement of ‘a state of elevated consciousness’ through passionate, painterly abstraction, Cantique examines the intangible memories and music evoked by the landscape through the essence of color.
“Rothko’s work opened up lots of interesting associations for me. It was so different from the insipid realism of the European School. It was like a door that opened to another interior vision. Yes, I felt that I was awakening to the music of another forest, one of subliminal energy. Rothko’s works brought back the images of japmala, where the repetition of a word continues till you achieve a state of elevated consciousness [...] Rothko’s works made me understand the feel for spatial perception” (Raza: Celebrating 85 years, exhibition catalogue, New Delhi, 2007, unpaginated).
In the early 1970s, developing this style of painting, Raza’s work began to exhibit an increasingly sophisticated use of brushstroke and palette that denoted location, emotion and spirituality in place of tangible forms. His gestural brushwork was painterly not in the sense of texture, but in further expressing the complex emotions Raza associated with the landscape, particularly that of his childhood home in Central India. “Physical location did not necessarily mean a spiritual and creative dislocation […] For him hereafter art was to be his home, reconstructed through memory, resonance and imagination. It was soon to be also his spiritual haven, a space where he could connect with the infinite, the limitless and the timeless” (A. Vajpeyi, A Life in Art: Raza, New Delhi, 2007, p. 98).
The present lot, part of a small series of works from this period that Raza titled Cantique or song of praise, pays homage to the intertwined nature of the arts, particularly in ancient India, and the equal capacity of painting and music to elevate the spirit. Here, Raza uses energetic brushstrokes and a vivid palette, dominated by shades of green and orange to offer a tribute to the land and its bounty with a painted song of praise in the style that the critic Geeta Kapur dubbed his “rhapsodic nature based abstraction” (G. Kapur, ‘Excerpt from different chapters of Contemporary Indian Artists,’ Understanding Raza: Many Ways of Looking at a Master, New Delhi, p. 172).
Cantique thus represents an important stage of the formal and personal exploration that characterized Raza’s artistic practice across the arc of his eight decade long career. With a renewed interest in his Indian heritage and the potential for introspection and the achievement of ‘a state of elevated consciousness’ through passionate, painterly abstraction, Cantique examines the intangible memories and music evoked by the landscape through the essence of color.