When Sayed Haider Raza was eight years old, the school headmaster in his village in Mandla district in British India gave him a punishment. A restless Raza, by his own admission "a bad student", was asked to stay back after class. The teacher drew a black dot on the white wall of a verandah and asked Raza to sit and stare at the point with full concentration. Years later in an interview, Raza said “I could not understand the motivation [of this exercise], but I obeyed.” The benefit of hindsight allows us to flag this innocuous incident as life-changing considering the way the master-painter came to be synonymous with the single point motif that is "Bindu", also interpreted as shunya or the void of nothingness. But, there's more to Raza, a celebrated modernist who along with F.N. Souza and M.F. Husain set up the Progressive Artists Group in 1947, than his trademark Bindu.
The Arts Trust, parent company of online auction house AstaGuru, is exhibiting 100 works of acclaimed artist S H Raza (1922-2016). The retrospective, ‘Raza-Rendezvous’, features the artist's masterpieces drawn from an oeuvre spanning six decades, from 1940 to 2000. It offers an overarching glimpse into Raza’s artistic evolution from his early expressionist landscapes to his explorations with geometric forms in the 70s and his eventual progression into works centred around “Bindu”, which he believed served as the centre of the universe charged with energy.
"The web platform enables us to showcase the works by SH Raza to a much wider audience and that is extremely crucial given the fact that we intend to spread awareness of the master's art," says Siddanth Shetty, vice president of The Arts Trust.
S.H. Raza, Sanshari, Acrylic on canvas, 1994, Image courtesy of The Arts Trust
Born in 1922 in Babaria, a small village in Madhya Pradesh, Raza grew up in the midst of verdant forests in Mandala, where his family moved after he turned six. He studied painting at the Nagpur School of Art and later at the Sir J. J. School of Arts in Bombay, and after graduation formed the Progressive Artists Group which would alter the course of Indian painting in the way it developed a modernist language. But soon he left for France on a scholarship in 1950 and studied painting at the École Nationale des Beaux-Arts from 1950 to 1953. France was to make a strong impression on Raza, so much so that he spent most of his working life there in Paris, and also met his lifelong partner in Janine Mongillat, a French artist.
Raza became the first non-French artist to be awarded the Prix de la Critique in Paris in 1956 and held numerous exhibitions both in India and abroad. But, Raza always retained his Indian passport. Wrote Hindi poet and critic Ashok Vajpeyi last month, "For a couple of decades, life was not easy for Raza in France. He was accepted as a painter of the Parisian School which gave him some recognition but it made him unhappy about his artistic identity. It is then that he, through a lot of agonising self-questioning, recalled the 'bindu."
In the same article in The Indian Express, Vajpeyi recalls Raza saying "that he learnt how to paint from France and what to paint from India." A strong colourist, Raza's paintings capture the colours of India with all their symbolic and emotive value. He was awarded the Padma Shri in 1981, around the same period he began his explorations with the Bindu motif.
Raza-Rendezvous is on view till October 9 at http://theartstrust.com
