As the Indian art fraternity celebrates Sayed Haider Raza’s centenary (he was born on February 22, 1922), I recall the first-ever major retrospective show of his that I did. It was in 2002, at the Jehangir Art Gallery, and it surprised many collectors, who least expected a South Indian gallery to be the first one to do something of this magnitude.
The truth was, up until then there had been little interest in him. After meeting Raza in 1985 at Jehangir gallery, at the only major show of modernist painter Bal Chhabda (presented by members of the Progressive Artists’ Group, or PAG, which Raza co-founded in 1947), I built an interest in him while his other gallery friends forsook him (the second generation who took over the galleries were looking at the works of younger artists).
SH Raza at Delhi’s Vadehra Art Gallery in 2014 | Photo Credit: Getty Images
While we were working on the 2002 show — to celebrate his eightieth birthday — what a treasure he let me see. I climbed up a ladder in his home, dived into his loft, and fished out all kinds of things. There were drawings and sketches and paintings, right from his early days. I found a board that had Raza’s work painted over Akbar Padamsee’s. It was a painting similar to Raza’s paperworks of the same period, with a Padamsee signature in front and Raza’s at the back! They all shared studios, and if you look at the works of Raza, Padamsee and FN Souza from the 50s (members of PAG), they were much like each other. They were friends, their lives entwined along with influences of Paris and its environs.
Straddling India and France
Ours was an eventful couple of decades of friendship, with many trips to visit him and his lovely wife, Janine Mongillat, in France. They refused to let me stay with my friends in Paris; it was always at their Rue de Charonne apartment, where the guest room was in Janine’s studio. It was in a repurposed old convent, where they had one very large floor that housed the couple’s home and studio, which they shared with their cat, Bonnard.
Raza’s journey that began with his birth in Mandla, a tribal village in Madhya Pradesh, led to a scholarship at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris where he met his artist wife. To the dismay of her parents, she married the Indian artist and son of a forest ranger — who had stayed back to read philosophy and study the work of post-impressionist painter Cézanne on the advice of photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson — and remained his strongest supporter up until 2002, when he lost her to cancer.
Raza’s ‘Sanshari’ (1994), part of the ‘Bindu’ series | Photo Credit: Special arrangement
Janine put aside her art career (showing very occasionally) to assist and support Raza on his journey. As I became familiar with her body of work over the many visits as a house guest in her studio bedroom, I realised how strong her work was and recognised the sacrifice she had made for her husband’s career.
Raza was the master at home who dominated the conversation, but as we two women bonded, she and I would go shopping and chat about all the things in India that he hadn’t shared with her. It was Janine who introduced me to Paris, my favourite city, and the streets that I am so familiar with now.
To the moon and the bindu
This artist couple in the 90s, when hardly anyone from the Indian art world visited them, gave me the most lovely memories in both Paris and Gorbio in southern France where they had a summer home. Their studio there, in a lovely little cottage in the mountains (which still stands today), had a view of the Côte d’Azur.
Sharan Apparao with Raza | Photo Credit: Special arrangement
My favourite Gorbio story is when, on one of my summer trips, I asked Raza about an unusual painting that hung high above the door in the studio. It was green and orange, a departure from his paintings of bold primary geometrics. As I looked at it puzzled, he said it was the orange moon. Having never seen one, I told myself it was his mind’s image. That night we were walking across the village to its only restaurant for dinner, and lo and behold in the sky I sight this big ball of orange. I exclaimed, to which Raza politely said, “See, I told you.” Something in the Mediterranean air gave it the colour, which was perhaps one of the reasons why this element, mixed with imagery from tantric art, became Raza’s le motif after the 80s.
Having made his home in Paris, he realised he had to stand apart and bring something strong to his art. Conversations with painter-sculptor Velu Viswanathan and his exposure to Ajit Mookerjee’s writings on tantric art allowed him to translate these ideas and combine them with his abstracts. The dark sun in his abstract landscapes of the 70s became the ‘Bindu’ in his works from the 90s — a part of his exploration of nature that he made his very own and is now known to all of us. The repeated motives he used, he told me, was like a japam (chant), which was refined each time and slowly evolved.
Raza would have turned a hundred this week (he died in 2016), and his idea of the beej (seed) and the empty void of the womb — the circle of life and death — still continues. The cycle is the circle, the bindu, the beginning and the end, and what he bestowed on the Indian art world.
Sharan Apparao is a curator and gallerist, and founder of Apparao Galleries in Chennai and New Delhi.
