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Untitled (Trees in Landscape) signed and dated 'RAZA 1955' (upper left); further signed, inscribed and dated 'RAZA / 55 Bd. Jourdan / Paris 14e / 1953' (on the reverse) oil on board 19 5/8 x 22 (49.8 x 56 cm.) Painted in 1953-55
Painted just a few years after Sayed Haider Raza’s arrival in France, Untitled (Trees in Landscape) offers an understanding of the critical shift in the artist's oeuvre during the early 1950s. After founding the revolutionary Bombay based Progressive Artists' Group with Francis Newton Souza and Maqbool Fida Husain in 1947, the year of India's Independence, Raza left India for France, arriving in 1949 to attend the école Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts. He excitedly recollects absorbing the thriving local scene and eagerly visiting all the museums, particularly drawn to the coloration and compositions of the Post-Impressionists. The palette and compositions of Paul Cézanne and Vincent Van Gogh in particular had a major impact on Raza’s own iconography, as well as the French countryside he explored. Speaking about one of these museum visits the artist recalled that he “[…] cried in front of the portrait of Van Gogh. Cézanne led me away from the emotive approach to the rational approach in art” (S.H. Raza, Itinerary, New Delhi, 2015, p. 20).
In works from this period, the texture of Raza’s brushstrokes thickened as he moved from using gouache and watercolor to oil, and his confident strokes seemed to carve the painted surface with their strength. The European landscapes Raza discovered during his travels in France, Spain and Italy at the time fuelled his experimentation in the genre. In the present lot, Raza’s brush deftly delineates the tiled roofs of a group of houses, against a landscape immersed in shadow, executed in an earthy palette of burnt sienna and deep umber. More prominent than the architectural structures, however, are the contours and colors of the primitive tree that rises between them, throwing into question the scale and perspective of this unique composition. Untitled (Trees in Landscape) preceeds the tumbling French landscapes he would paint for the rest of the decade, as well as the abstract compositions inspired by nature that would soon follow.
As the artist notes, his early years in Paris provided him with experiences and tools that were essential in building the strong foundations on which his practice developed and evolved. “France gave me several acquisitions. First of all, ‘le sens plastique’, by which I mean a certain understanding of the vital elements in painting. Second, a measure of clear thinking and rationality. The third, which follows from this proposition, is a sense of order and proportion in form and structure. Lastly, France has given me a sense of ‘savoir vivre’: the ability to perceive and to follow a certain discerning quality in life" (Artist statement, G. Sen, Bindu: Space and Time in Raza's Vision, New Delhi, 1997, pp. 55-57). The 1950s were thus a critical decade for Raza, when the artist strove to reconcile his personal vocabulary and artistic sensibilities with the academic and modernist aesthetics in which he had immersed himself in the West.