Osian's Auction Catalogue Indian Modern Contemporary Fine Arts | October 2018

78 OSIAN’s – Connoisseurs of Art "It was the art of medieval Europe and the early Renaissance that spoke to him most convincingly. Byzantine painting, Romanesque sculpture, and the Italian primitives particularly of the Sienese school, such as Simone Martini and Lorenzetti, appealed to him in their austerity which was capable of conveying the most exquisite poetic sensitivity….There began to appear now out of his studio, after long and arduous work, a new type of landscape. Stylized houses, towers, spiresmeticulously assembled in paintings where they lived their own mysterious life. Raza had entered a ‘classic’ period…Each shape was carefully related to another, weighed, balanced till it had found its place in the composition which would appear unshakeable. Colour had undergone the most intricate studies to be able to express the finest overtones of a poetic situation. Because that is what these paintings really are: poetic situations. They were as austere and as sensitive as the landscape backgrounds in the paintings of the Sienese primitives with their garlands of houses, walls and towers strung across the horizon." Rudi von Leyden, rpt. in Raza. Sadanga Series, 1959.