‘It was in 1952 that I saw the first works of Raza, recently arrived in Paris from India. They were strange and unusual works: timeless landscapes, uninhabited cities detached from the earth, bathed in cold light. Schematized houses were linked one to another in an endless, sinuous chain […].’
Offering a rare glimpse into Sayed Haider Raza’s foundational practice, lots 8 and 9 are two exceptional and beautifully contrasting examples of the painter’s early work. Often referred to as his classic phase, the early 1950s saw the artist use curious, cubist forms and saturated hues to reimagine his surroundings. Raza had just moved from Bombay to Paris, and this brief but lauded phase in his career forms an intriguing visual commentary on his new French abode. The landscapes are eerily beautiful, and reveal influences from early Renaissance and ‘Sienese’ townscapes, with Raza’s perfectly formed houses linked and suspended together along imagined streets and skylines. Exhibiting the artist’s preference for gouache and watercolor, before he was to shift to oil painting, this experimental period saw Raza hone his practice and understanding of shape and color.
‘There began to appear now out of his studio, after long and arduous work, a new type of landscape. Stylized houses, towers, spires meticulously assembled in paintings where they lived their own mysterious life. Raza has entered a 'classic' period… Each shape was carefully related to another, weighed, balanced till it had found its place in the composition which would appear unshakeable. Colour had undergone the most intricate studies to be able to express the finest overtones of a poetic situation. Because that is what these paintings really are: poetic situations. They were as austere and sensitive as the landscape backgrounds in the paintings of the Sienese primitives with their garlands of houses, walls and towers strung across the horizon.’
Image reproduced from A. Vajpeyi, A Life in Art: S. H. Raza, Art Alive Gallery, New Delhi, 2007, p. 55
With compacted houses and compressed horizon lines, lots 8 and 9 demonstrate a masterful orchestration of line and form. Dated 1951 and 1952 respectively, the compositions share the same foundations, in their construction and execution, but the realities are strikingly different. In lot 9, Untitled (La Ville), three ‘garlands’ of houses stand upon a rich ground of ochre and green. The facades are infilled with saturated green, yellow and red, and are detailed with miniaturized windows, doors, balconies and the silhouettes of trees. Whilst the hues of certain houses are particularly resplendent - as if lit by the rising or setting sun - the composition and its background pigment share a similar and sumptuous tonality.
By contrast, the townscape in Houses is set upon a ground of pure black. The buildings are a kaleidoscope of vibrant yellows, oranges, blues, greens and white, and more clustered and chaotic in their configuration. Whilst in lot 9 the viewer seems to view the town from a distance, here, the diagonal orientation of the lower street and the foregrounded houses place the viewer within the scene itself. The brightly lit buildings and dark night sky of this lot reverts the paradoxical concept of René Magritte’s famous Empire of Light paintings, in which nocturnal, lamp-lit streets are set beneath a bright sunlit sky.
Despite the distinct coloration and composition of both lots, they are imbued with the same sense of the uncanny. These townscapes, Raza’s ‘poetic situations’, possess an otherworldly charm, and were sadly not seen again in the painter’s oeuvre, as he soon shifted to his expressionist, gestural landscapes in oil. Fewer than ten works of this particular period and style have ever appeared on the international auction market, affirming their rarity and desirability.
This February, a landmark retrospective of Raza's work opened at Centre Pompidou, Paris. This exhibition surveys the artist's work from 1950, when he arrived in France, through to 2011. Nearly 100 works are on view, and among them, the famous Haut de Cagnes (1951) will represent his early stylized landscapes. The sale of Raza's Houses and Untitled (La Ville) is a rare opportunity to acquire comparable works of this caliber and singularity.