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拍品专文
It was the search for the intangible […] Elementary experiences of night and day, joy and anguish, summer and winter became my subjects for the fact that they were felt more than seen.
- Sayed Haider Raza
The son of a forest ranger, Sayed Haider Raza was born in Madhya Pradesh in Central India, in 1922. Growing up in the lush Narmada River valley, nature played a central role in the artist’s life from a very young age. It is not surprising, then, that throughout his career, Raza explored and developed on the intimate connection he shared with the land and the natural world, and would go on to revolutionize the genre of modernist landscape painting in ways that continue to reverberate through the contemporary art world today.
Raza spent over sixty years of his artistic career living in France, and the landscape of his adopted country played a critical role in his work in the 1950s and 1960s, even as it moved towards abstraction. Raza underscored this by often titling his works from this period after aspects that had a bearing on the natural features of the landscape, be it a specific place, season or even time of day. The present lot, painted in 1961 and titled Soir à Espinouse, or ‘Evening in Espinouse’ is named after a picturesque mountainous region in the Haut-Languedoc National Park between Toulouse and Montpellier in Southern France, where the artist spent a lot of time.
Devoid of representational features, this vibrant work represents a stark shift from Raza’s paintings of the bucolic French countryside that drew inspiration from the formal constructions of Cézanne and the palette of Van Gogh. Moving away from direct representation and ordered construction, here the artist adopts a highly emotive palette and thick, expressive brushwork to communicate his emotional response to nature and the landscape at a powerful, transitional time of day. Color overtakes formal construction, and landscapes like this one become less about tangible representation and more about the mood they evoke. “What is created in Raza’s fragmentation of forms are analogies – not the outward manifestation of reality as in his earliest works, or the imaginary landscapes in his early gouaches – but the ‘real thing,’ through the substantial realm of colour. There is a vigour here, and an irrepressible rhythm; but it is no longer nature as ‘seen’ or as ‘constructed’, but nature as experienced” (G. Sen, Bindu: Space and Time in Raza’s Vision, New Delhi, 1997, p. 79).
One of the most seminal works from this key period in Raza’s career, Soir à Espinouse is characterized by a well thought out palette and expressive brushwork. Although the pictorial space in paintings from the period like the present lot is less structured, it is cleverly balanced to express the play of light and color in nature at the specific time and place Raza intended. With the freer and more expressive brushstrokes that characterized his work from this period, Raza “continued to explore further possibilities of colour, making colour rather than any geometrical design or division the pivotal element around which his paintings moved. Also, colours were not being used as merely formal elements: they were emotionally charged. Their movements or consonances on the canvases seemed more and more to be provoked by emotions, reflecting or embodying emotive content. The earlier objectivity, or perhaps the distance started getting replaced or at least modified by an emergent subjectivity – colours started to carry the light load of emotions more than ever before” (A. Vajpeyi, S.H. Raza, A Life in Art, New Delhi, 2007, p. 78).
Significantly, Soir à Espinouse, with its meticulously graded blues and blacks that get progressively deeper and more saturated as the viewer’s eye moves from left to right across the picture plane, celebrates the sublime and magical time of twilight. Dotted with flashes of red and iridescent white, this painting evokes a powerful sense of nature and the coming night by fusing abstract, symbolic forms into an expression of the mood and atmosphere of the forested mountains in Espinouse.
Also drawing from Raza’s tenacious childhood memories of life in the densely forested villages of Central India, this painting is almost translocal in its representation of the rich sensations during the deepening night. “Some of the most haunting works of this period are those which evoke the night [...] where the liminal sheaths of black are illuminated by sparks of white light [...] As with Mark Rothko, black is one of the richest colours in Raza’s palette and signifies a state of fulsomeness. However, for both painters, colours plumb the depths and are not simply used for their own sake” (Y. Dalmia, ‘The Subliminal World of Raza’, A Life in Art: S.H. Raza, New Delhi, 2007, pp. 197-198).
- Sayed Haider Raza
The son of a forest ranger, Sayed Haider Raza was born in Madhya Pradesh in Central India, in 1922. Growing up in the lush Narmada River valley, nature played a central role in the artist’s life from a very young age. It is not surprising, then, that throughout his career, Raza explored and developed on the intimate connection he shared with the land and the natural world, and would go on to revolutionize the genre of modernist landscape painting in ways that continue to reverberate through the contemporary art world today.
Raza spent over sixty years of his artistic career living in France, and the landscape of his adopted country played a critical role in his work in the 1950s and 1960s, even as it moved towards abstraction. Raza underscored this by often titling his works from this period after aspects that had a bearing on the natural features of the landscape, be it a specific place, season or even time of day. The present lot, painted in 1961 and titled Soir à Espinouse, or ‘Evening in Espinouse’ is named after a picturesque mountainous region in the Haut-Languedoc National Park between Toulouse and Montpellier in Southern France, where the artist spent a lot of time.
Devoid of representational features, this vibrant work represents a stark shift from Raza’s paintings of the bucolic French countryside that drew inspiration from the formal constructions of Cézanne and the palette of Van Gogh. Moving away from direct representation and ordered construction, here the artist adopts a highly emotive palette and thick, expressive brushwork to communicate his emotional response to nature and the landscape at a powerful, transitional time of day. Color overtakes formal construction, and landscapes like this one become less about tangible representation and more about the mood they evoke. “What is created in Raza’s fragmentation of forms are analogies – not the outward manifestation of reality as in his earliest works, or the imaginary landscapes in his early gouaches – but the ‘real thing,’ through the substantial realm of colour. There is a vigour here, and an irrepressible rhythm; but it is no longer nature as ‘seen’ or as ‘constructed’, but nature as experienced” (G. Sen, Bindu: Space and Time in Raza’s Vision, New Delhi, 1997, p. 79).
One of the most seminal works from this key period in Raza’s career, Soir à Espinouse is characterized by a well thought out palette and expressive brushwork. Although the pictorial space in paintings from the period like the present lot is less structured, it is cleverly balanced to express the play of light and color in nature at the specific time and place Raza intended. With the freer and more expressive brushstrokes that characterized his work from this period, Raza “continued to explore further possibilities of colour, making colour rather than any geometrical design or division the pivotal element around which his paintings moved. Also, colours were not being used as merely formal elements: they were emotionally charged. Their movements or consonances on the canvases seemed more and more to be provoked by emotions, reflecting or embodying emotive content. The earlier objectivity, or perhaps the distance started getting replaced or at least modified by an emergent subjectivity – colours started to carry the light load of emotions more than ever before” (A. Vajpeyi, S.H. Raza, A Life in Art, New Delhi, 2007, p. 78).
Significantly, Soir à Espinouse, with its meticulously graded blues and blacks that get progressively deeper and more saturated as the viewer’s eye moves from left to right across the picture plane, celebrates the sublime and magical time of twilight. Dotted with flashes of red and iridescent white, this painting evokes a powerful sense of nature and the coming night by fusing abstract, symbolic forms into an expression of the mood and atmosphere of the forested mountains in Espinouse.
Also drawing from Raza’s tenacious childhood memories of life in the densely forested villages of Central India, this painting is almost translocal in its representation of the rich sensations during the deepening night. “Some of the most haunting works of this period are those which evoke the night [...] where the liminal sheaths of black are illuminated by sparks of white light [...] As with Mark Rothko, black is one of the richest colours in Raza’s palette and signifies a state of fulsomeness. However, for both painters, colours plumb the depths and are not simply used for their own sake” (Y. Dalmia, ‘The Subliminal World of Raza’, A Life in Art: S.H. Raza, New Delhi, 2007, pp. 197-198).