60 6 august 2018to paint pictures of buildings”.
Never a figurative painter, even his earliest of paintings on
display prove his inclination towards landscape. in the Bombay
street scenes that he painted with such expressionistic fervour,
the figures are reduced to blobs of paint and buildings are blocks
of geometry. Rajagopalan says that it would be unfair to evalu-
ate Raza’s early works critically. Call them an apprentice’s first
steps, but they are important for people to see, as they are early
indicators of his tendency towards abstraction. it is as if even as a
young artist he knew that essence was a quality to be aspired to in
a work of art. “in these watercolours, he doesn’t go into details.
You can see that he was already thinking in form and colour
than in figure,” Rajagopalan explains. “He worked with a lot
of spontaneity and a furious pace,” Ramanathan adds. “as he
captured Bombay, there was a certain thirst in the artist—this
young man coming from a small village in Madhya Pradesh
and his burst of excitement and first taste of freedom in a big
city. These paintings express a lot of restlessness and energy and
the twists and turns he took in exploring the city to make new
connections.” Records suggest that Raza lived in Bombay be-
tween 1943 and 1950 before his departure for Paris, and nobody
knew exactly when the prodigal son would return. Finding
Bombay ‘very inspiring’, Raza wrote in his autobiography:
‘These seven years of my life and work were a sort of awakening,
a realization of the real values involved in painting. The idea of
nature, the impact of nature from childhood, was an important
element. But in Bombay i realized that a painter should know
his language as a writer should know the vocabulary, the gram-
mar and the meaning of words.’ Bombay was a hive of activity
when a 21-year-old Raza arrived from Nagpur. Thanks to it, he
enjoyed the lifelong friendship of the PaG and the patronage of
Jewish émigrés like Rudi von Leyden, Walter Langhammer and
Emanuel schlesinger who were instrumental in introducing
the PaG upstarts to European modern art.
T
H E 1950 s WERE an interesting time both in historical
terms and personally for Raza. He stayed at a printing shop
and explored the city. His interactions with the PaG—which
would discuss the Communist Manifesto—fired his
imagination. in such a politically charged climate, the PaG,
while never a very political group, shared a common approach
towards indian painting, a refreshingly modern outlook. The
Bengali art tradition was strong at the time, and in some ways,
the PaG was a reaction against staid and old ways. Like his
contemporaries, Raza was a man of vision. But hardly did the
bright lights of the PaG know that their revolution would pave
the way for modern indian art.
Many artists of the PaG eventually left Bombay in search
of greener creative pastures, although they remained thick
friends through a regular exchange of letters and paintings.
souza went to London, for example, while Ram Kumar,
akbar Padamsee and Raza found solace in Paris.
Krishen Khanna says, “My big interest was poetry and Raza
was impressed with the fact that i knew a lot about poetry, poets
and the likes. Despite being from different backgrounds, we
connected at a deeper level. He came from the Hindi way of life
while my training was more in English, Persian and Urdu. He
could recite shlokas. i couldn’t. i said, ‘i can give you shlokas in
Persian.’ in fact, when his scholarship ran out in Paris, he gave
lessons in Hindi for survival.”
Traversing Terrains also digs out a 1944 watercolour from
Banaras that the artist painted on his travels across india. it
is worth nothing that at one point both Ram Kumar and MF
Husain were fascinated by the spiritual charms of Banaras,
and while Husain chose to return in a week, Ram Kumar, who
passed away this april at 94, made the holy city his muse. The
result is a stunning body of Banaras landscapes that Kumar
produced till the very end of his life. are Raza and Kumar kin-
dred spirits, and if so, what shape would Raza’s trajectory have
taken if he had stayed back in india? “Both had spiritual aspects
to their landscapes,” replies Ramanathan. “Their temperament
and attitude to art was the same. in terms of their artistic direc-
tion, i’d say, they headed in different ways. That was the beauty
of the PaG. Every one of them developed their own trajectory.”i
N KasHMiR iN the 1940s, Raza was said to have met the
legendary French photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson who,
though impressed by the young artist’s work, advised him to
study Paul Cézanne. “‘Raza, your paintings are good but they
lack construction,’ he said. ‘a painting is like a house. Without a
solid foundation, it will fall.’ it was so puzzling! What was con-
struction in a painting? i never knew,” Raza had once remarked.
in 1950, Raza left for Paris to study the French masters like
Cézanne and other Post-impressionists. For those keen to un-
derstand his Parisian odyssey, Traversing Terrains has displayedsurya namaskar; (RigHt) eglise et calvaire bretonart