Sayed Haider Raza, the last of the modernists has taken away with him his passion and pursuit of chromatics. If we look at the year of his birth that goes back to 1922, his age and stature, his achievements in the world of art were both magisterial and magnificent.
After having created works that were impressionist with Western flavours in early years along with very romantic Kashmir and Mumbai landscapes we are looking at an individual who wasn’t afraid of self-questioning, wasn’t afraid of exploring the experimental, and wanted to learn from different movements in art.
Advaita philosophy
His humility and his honesty about his work and his ability to open himself to anyone who interviewed him is what made him charismatic. When I interviewed him, he often spoke about the Advaitya philosophy. He said: “Divya shaktiyon ke sahayog ke bina kala nahin. The rationale behind the quest for symbolism lies in the Advaita philosophy. Everything that emanates is born through this expression of both duality and non-duality of being. It has taken me more than 50 years to understand the holistic nature of the Bindu, which I believe is at the centre of all creation. It is the communion with nature that reflects the bearing and the being of the consonance with the doctrines of path. It is this experience that externalises the form of continuity of any identical substance.”
Burning blues
Raza could speak for unending hours about his work. His works were born of the earth. They would either be in consonance with the beauty of the sun, the mineral tones of the earth or burning blues that would catch your breath. When I asked him about the Prussian blues that he would paint he asked me if I knew about Eid ka Chand. He smiled and explained: “I was drawn to water wherever I went. It would provide a stimulus for me. I am a romantic; I took the blue moon as my focus, as if celebrating a rare sighting – my search was always for the true and unforced image. Respecting all religions enriched me. Lunar movements and its impact on nature is something I was very alive to.”
Symbolism
So it wouldn’t be wrong to say when he used yellow and orange tones he was giving us tonalities and intonations of the alchemy of the sun. His sensitivity to the rhythms of nature was born of his own understanding of polarities of solar and lunar realms. When he finally began his inclusion of the black Bindu it was as if he was enchanted by a journey that went beyond the black sun. Symbolism was always resonant and recurring in his works.
His understanding of Indian holy texts and philosophy was so deep that is why he could speak in terms of germination and seed and growth and the idea of reincarnation. His love for the works of Mark Rothko showed how he translated the landscape into deepened colours that were saturated. What is fascinating is how he positioned himself to move from planes of distilled embers into the sublime.
The abstractionist in Raza melded spiritual practices and leanings too – that is why he named his works in terms of energy principles. He created his own analogies to myths, we can understand that when we look at new works as well as older works. Symbolism for Raza was drawn from nature and his childhood became his reverie – it was like an album of memories that was connected to the soil, the monsoon, the rivers and his rural idyll in Madhya Pradesh. Nostalgia played a vital role in his life and his ability to recite verses in both French and Urdu and Hindi showed his brilliance and his perseverance. However, it is his older works that give us a clear pathway to his evolution.
Raza’s Bindus
Raza’s Bindu’s were two kinds of disc co-ordinates. The black dense large circle as well as a series of ripple concentrics. When he embodied the dense large black sun he gave it names corresponding to the panchatatva colours. When he created it as ripples he used the Nad and Shanthi. The Shantibindus were done in tonalities that were warm and chromatic or soft and subdued like chants in a mantra. Raza’s Shanti bindu presents a foray into the understanding of humankind’s place in the universe that becomes incredibly relevant in the post-war period in the world. There is also a profoundly utopian element in Shanti bindu that reflects Raza’s quest for an art that both acknowledges our metaphysical place in the universe and frees the soul.
“My Bindu is primarily a philosophical expression, an act of faith in the infinite, an affirmation of spirituality,” Raza declared when he created a Shanti bindu for my show Five Quartets at Art Konsult last year. “When I sit down in front of one of my paintings to contemplate it, I suddenly feel a great expansion of the spirit, I feel like a man who belongs to the vastness of the present and the past. The Bindu is my search for the spirit, and my works embody that spirit that is why I have created many works that are off white and grey in tonality too, this is the language of purity, it is parallel to my own perception and my evolution.”
Italian Village
My favourite work amongst his older works is a work called Italian Village that celebrates cubism and the austere landscape of an Italian hamlet. Italian Village created in 1953 was a large work that came to Christie’s for auction. It is important because it epitomises the influence of European art on Raza's during the 1950s.
This painting, reflected that Raza had studied and understood the internal logic of line and space in order to give us a collective image of buildings that could form a cubist cluster. The flatness of cubism and the strength of the contour transformed this work into a classic study. He already knew that perspective and harmony were both very important elements in the creation of a landscape.
If we look closely there is a very European signature to this moody work that actually has a resonance of isolation and solitude but it has a certain echo of deeper intensities and the work tells us that when Raza created a painting he looked at it like a pilgrim who was telling a tale while on his journey. In 1953 having studied Cezanne and the impressionists and the cubists and the European Masters he knew how to create monumental works that were both spiritual as well as stoically silent. His handling had a maturity it was only a matter of finding his own Indianesque journey.
(The writer is a seasoned art critic and author of ‘Reverie with Raza’)
