Osian's Auction Catalogue Indian Modern Fine Arts | June 2017

42 S.H. Raza (1922 – 2016) Paysage d’hiver (Winter Landscape) Oil on canvas, 1966 S/d ‘RAZA 66’ l.r. Inscribed ‘RAZA P.667’66 30P “Paysage d’hiver” on verso 35.8 x 25.4 in (91.0 x 64.4 cm) Provenance Acquired directly from the Artist S.H. Raza by Galerie Lara Vincy, Paris; thereafter part of a Private French Collection before being acquired by Delhi-based Collector. INR 5,000,000 – 7,500,000 USD 78,125 – 117,188 In the ‘sixties and ‘seventies visits to India re-sensitized his perceptiveness for a final supreme and universal viewing of nature, not as appearance, not as spectacle but as an integrated force of life and cosmic growth reflected in every elementary particle and in every fibre of a human being. The five elements which in Hindu thought build this and other worlds – earth, jala – water, pawak – fire, gagan – sky and samara – ether and their correspondence, on the one hand, to areas of consciousness in the human mind and, on the other, to the colours yellow – padma, white – sulka, red – tejas, blue – nila and black – Krishna captured Raza’s imagination to the point of complete identification of himself with his painted work. Nature became to Raza something not to be observed or to be imagined but something to be experienced in the very act of putting paint on canvas. Painting acts itself out as a natural force, struggling in darkness, breaking into light, shivering in cold, burning in heat, trying to find form and yet dissolving into chaos. Rudolf von Leyden rpt. in Raza Gorbio & Bombay 1978 ExC.