Delhi-based KNMA is celebrating SH Raza with a centenary exhibition till June 30

This year, we celebrate the centenary of one of the country’s most important 20th-century painters, Sayed Haider Raza. Born to a forest ranger in 1922 in Madhya Pradesh, Raza co-founded the historic Progressive Artists’ Group along with influential artists such as FN Souza and MF Husain. Delhi-based Kiran Nadar Museum of Art (KNMA) is celebrating the artist with an ongoing centenary exhibition titled, Sayed Haider Raza Traversing Space: Here and Beyond. Curated by Roobina Karode, Chief Curator and Director, KNMA, the exhibition is on till June 30.

“The pandemic only strengthened the rigid segregation between national boundaries and class divisions, communal ostracisation and ethnic chauvinism, all fostered ironically by the forces of globalisation themselves. It is in this crucial historical context that we revisit the cosmopolitan modernism of Raza, whose complex and itinerant body of works counteracts many of the prevailing assumptions of the present,” says the curator. He started out with Modernist styles, but it’s probably his works in Abstract Expressionism and, later, Geometric Abstraction, that brought the world to him. It was his mastery of colour merging with Geometric Abstraction that made him a global name. In fact, his Geometric Abstraction often brings to mind the paintings of American Abstractionist Frank Stella, renowned for his simple shapes, methodical repetition and minimalistic patterns.

Briefly working in the US, Raza was exposed to the colour field painting and the medium of acrylic. It merged seamlessly with his longstanding interest in the compositional idioms of Rajput and Pahari miniature traditions. It further enabled him to arrive at a distinct visual language. The real breakthrough in his career came with the artist’s discovery of the pictorial and metaphysical motif of the ‘bindu’ (the point). During a 1978 trip, Raza visited his village school in Mandala, Madhya Pradesh. Whilst thinking of his teacher Shri Nandlalji Jharia who made a dot on the wall to teach the inattentive little Raza the lesson of concentration. The artist managed to find the wall with the mark made by his beloved master decades back and decided to delve deep into its spiritual meanings. The bindu alone became a dominant and consistent feature in the artist’s body of later works, which comprised metaphysical abstractions and the symbolism of square, triangle and circle. “It’s the centre of my life,” Raza said in 2010.

“The artist’s rediscovery of his childhood memory revealed a new path of creative adventure. As the contemplative image took its own time to develop and merge different elements of Raza’s artistic preoccupation, its transformative potential eventually turned into the shapes of concentric circles imagined as breath cycles, water ripples, reverberations, chants or musical rhythms always returning to their point of origin,” says Karode. Over the years, this cryptic symbol and its concentrated energy gradually acquired a distinct symbolism as the seed, womb, and the all-seeing chakshu (eyes), at times referring to the metaphysical idea of shunyata (nothingness) as well as the all-pervasive Ātman (the Self).

Talking of his earlier inspirations, Raza said in an interview in 2001 “The most tenacious memory of my childhood is the fear and fascination of Indian forests,” adding, “Even today I find that these two aspects of my life dominate me and are an integral part of my paintings.” He was later influenced by the American Abstract Expressionists, particularly Mark Rothko, whose work he came across when he was invited to teach at the University of California in Berkeley in 1962. “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,” he said of his time.

Villages and cities had been recurring subject matters in the early paintings of Raza before the artist started his famous metaphysical abstractions. “These works mainly from the KNMA collection clearly exhibit the young artist’s journey from an academically trained painter with realistic inclinations to one of the founding figures of modernism in India,” says Karode. Initiating the historic Progressive Artists’ Group in 1947 along with Husain and Souza, Raza started his career in the cosmopolitan city of then-Bombay, before finally settling in the village of Gorbio in Southern France decades later. He accepted a painting scholarship at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris in 1950 and went on to live in Paris for the next 60 years. He later settled in Delhi in 2011, after the death of his wife.

“In a way among the Progressive artists, Raza has had the most nuanced and balanced understanding and interpretation of both Indian and Western art traditions. The different paths of art philosophies and practices have come together and merged in his works creating a truly unique and singular language of artistic expression,” Karode says. Raza was known to meditate to Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke’s verses to evoke a sense of silence in himself. He would also internalise the crux of philosophies derived from cultural expressions from the East, in the form of poetry, music and theosophy. His stay in India and France afforded him the experience of both the noise of urban life and the tranquillity of rural retreat. There was in his paintings a unique ability to see through the extreme opposites of materiality and intangibility. With his art, he would arrive at the fundamental features of perception from both cultures, East and West.

By the end of his life—he passed in 2016, aged 94—Raza had received many awards, including the Padma Shri, Padma Bhushan and Padma Vibhushan, as also the French Legion of Honour. More than a dozen of his works have surpassed the $1 million mark at auctions globally. His 197 work, Tapovan, broke the artist’s world auction record when it sold for more than $4.5 million at Christie’s in New York in March 2018.