How S H Raza’s solo in Dubai represents his vast oeuvre

Also elongating his birth centenary celebrations — that included his first monographic exhibition in France at the prestigious Center Pompidou in Paris from February to May 2023 — Ashok Vajpeyi, Managing Trustee of The Raza Foundation, notes that the exhibition in Dubai takes forward the Parisian showcase. “The Pompidou show stopped at the end of the century but here we combine the earlier works with the last decades to give an expression to the continued creativity, also showing the significant last phase that hasn’t yet received adequate attention… When he was with the brush, he was in full command to his last,” he says.

Entering the calm of the gallery located few blocks from the bustling City Walk neighbourhood in Dubai on the peaceful Al Wasl Road — with magnificent views of the landmark Burj Khalifa through its glass windows — viewers are welcomed with a detailed timeline, introducing them to the art, life and times of the modernist who remains one of India’s most significant artists. “It is part of our effort to inform the audience of his varied influences and inspirations,” says RN Singh, founder of the gallery. On exhibiting Raza in Dubai, he adds that the show dominated by the gallery collection was planned over several years to include works from different periods.

The exhibition does not open directly to his trademark bindus, but a more chronological approach is followed as viewers are guided through the years that led to it. Known to be a master colourist, among the more seldom-seen works are Raza’s sketches that Vajpeyi says were discovered by The Raza Foundation after his death in 2016. The diaristic depictions range from the bucolic bullock cart to life studies, abstract landscapes and never-ending concentric circles. Appearing as insights into his mind, Vajpeyi notes, “Unlike FN Souza or Krishen Khanna, Raza did not really pursue drawings as an autonomous medium but these were more in the form of thoughts he felt were important to jot down. Many of them not necessarily resulted in paintings.”

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Son of a forest officer in Mandla district of Madhya Pradesh, who grew up near the quietude of Kanha National Park and Narmada river, as a young boy Raza’s engagement with art began at the behest of his art teacher in Damoh, who noticed his talent and asked him to illustrate a hand-written magazine, Pushpanjali. It was also on his suggestion that Raza enrolled for formal training in art at the Nagpur School of Art in the late ’30s. Representing the period in the exhibition, if a 1941 pencil portrait of a man belongs to the years when he was still a student in Nagpur, In a Forest alludes to his childhood. The 1943 translucent watercolour Gol Gumbaz, painted in pale shades, proves his prowess with the brush as also his ability to play between light and form even during his early artistic career.

The Bombay of the 1940s opened a new world to him. Working as a designer at Express Block Studio, Raza enrolled for lessons at the Sir JJ School of Art, and was introduced to the trends in European art by the likes of German art critic Rudolf von Leyden and Austrian painter Walter Langhammer. Choosing to stay in India when his family moved to Pakistan at Partition, the motherland was to become an integral part of his art. It was also the common purpose of finding a distinct modern vocabulary for Indian art that led to the formation of the formidable Progressive Artists’ Group in 1947, with Raza as one of its six founding members. In a book accompanying the exhibition, we find paintings representing his initial impressions of the urban metropolis, where he often wandered in the populated neighbourhoods to paint cityscapes as subjects. Among others is a 1945 view of Princess Street, which was also the address for the then Chemould Frames and where Kekoo Gandhy famously allowed artists to also exhibit their works.

Swasti, one of Raza’s very last canvases has the celebrated bindu at its centre (Credit: Raza Foundation)

When Raza went to Paris in 1950 on a French government scholarship to study at the École Nationale Supérieure de Beaux-Arts, at 28, he carried India with him. Though he continued to live there for almost six decades, following his marriage to French artist Janine Mongillat, he retained his Indian nationality, choosing to return to Delhi in 2010. “He used to say how to paint he learned from France and what to paint he learnt from India,” states Vajpeyi. Visiting its museums and art galleries, he acquainted himself with works of Western masters, including Paul Cezanne and Oskar Kokoschka. “There was so much I wanted to learn,” he had said in a 2015 interview to The Indian Express. Though his impressionist landscapes were already veering towards abstraction, in Paris the lyrical brush strokes became more fluid and the palette more vibrant. He also began working more often with mediums such as oil and later acrylic. The 1956 Village, for instance, has silhouettes of homes in the French countryside accentuated with swathes of the orange earth.

While he continued to receive critical acclaim and commercial success, the quest to find new directions constantly pulled him to his roots, and in the ’70s he found an answer in the dot that his primary school teacher in Mandla had drawn on a blackboard to contain his restlessness. Taking the form of a bindu, it became the centre of his universe that he described as the source of energy and life. Initially appearing as the black sun in works from the late ’60s, the leitmotif gained more prominence in the ’70s and continued to find different meanings and forms over the decades. “Like people do Ram jap, I do the same with the bindu, going deeper into the subject,” he stated in the 2015 interview.

In Dubai now, the ethereal dot denotes the boundless contemplations of its creator. Incidentally, it shares the gallery with Husain’s horses sculpted in Murano glass on view in a glass enclosure.