S.H.Raza’s Death: Sunset of India’s ‘Progressives’

India has lost one of its greatest modern painters with the death at 94 of Syed Haidar Raza. He was a leading member of the Bombay-based Progressives Artists’ Group of the late 1940s and 1950s that now dominates the top end of the Indian art market, and his passing marks the gradual closing of a chapter in the country’s post-independence art history.

Other famous members of the group such as V.S. Gaitonde, F.N.Souza, Tyeb Mehta and M.F. Husain have died in the past 15 years, most of them painting continuously till just before their deaths, as did Raza with his familiar canvas works of brightly colored squares, triangles and circles.

In June 2010, his massive 79in x 79in acrylic on canvas, Saurashtra, painted in 1983, hit a record price for Indian works at a Christie’s London auction.

It was bought for £2.4 million (US$3.5 million) by Kiran Nadar, a prominent collector for her Delhi museum. In 2014, his La Terre reached UD$12.79 million) at a Saffronart auction in Delhi.

He will be most remembered for his frequent use of the bindu, Sanskrit for dot or point, which represents cosmic power in Hindu tantric philosophy. It also leads to the name bindi for the small mark worn by Hindu women in their forehead

He once said that, when he was nine, his teacher drew a bindu on a white wall and made him stare at it to check his restlessness. “The bindu awakened a latent energy inside me,” Raza has said. “It is a source of energy, a still center and a point from which everything radiates.”

S.H. Raza, Krishen Khanna (behind him) and Ashok Vajpeyi (right) at the January 2016 Vadehra exhibition

His last exhibition, at Delhi’s Vadehra gallery in January this year, was astonishing because it consisted of more than 20 large acrylic on canvas works, and several smaller ones, all of which he had painted and were dated in 2015 (left, and Bindu below).

He came to the opening, frail and in a wheelchair, and I asked him whether he painted every day. “Yes almost,” he replied

I arranged with his friend Ashok Vajpeyi to go to his studio and watch him at work, but he became ill and that sadly never happened. Two artist assistants helped him I was told, as assistants and students have often done for leading artists down the centuries.

They drew the shapes that Raza wanted, and held a palate for him to select the paints with a slightly wavering brush. Large canvases were raised and lowered so he could reach them. The works still had their appeal of dramatic colors, tying together in a theme, though with less sharpness than before.

“He has a particular ability to weave together a canvas with different chromatic sequences all clustered together without injuring each other,” Krishen Khanna, 91, one of the few surviving Progressives told me, standing in the gallery alongside his old friend. “Look at the strong red which doesn’t interfere with the rest of the work,” he said, pointing to a particularly striking painting.

Bindu in the Vadehra exhibition of 2015 works

The two men wrote letters to each other from the 1950s that were published in 2013 by the Vadehra and the Raza Foundation.

“We couldn’t just tear them up, it’s bad to destroy such things,” said Khanna. They tell of the struggles of their early years, but are less frequent when the Progressives became standard bearers in the auctions for the boom in Indian art that developed from the early 2000s.

“I feel very lonely now. One by one they have all gone Ara, Raza, Gaitonde, Tyeb,” Khanna said yesterday. “Akbar Padamsee and Ram Kumar are the only others of our group who are now alive. Death has to happen in the course of the time but it does not take away personal sorrow”.

When the boom faded about eight years ago and works by India’s more adventurous contemporary artists fell from popularity and peak prices, paintings by Raza and his Progressive colleagues like Souza, Mehta and Gaitonde have continued to flourish. Their mostly figurative and abstract studies have continued to hit new records for the best works, though there have been some flops, and Raza in particular has sometimes been hit by fakes reaching galleries and auction houses.

S.H.Raza in one of his studios – Art&Style photo

When they started, the Progressives were important because they challenged India’s artistic traditions while also recognizing and adopting art styles they saw in Europe and the US, where some, including Souza, went to live.

“We were not allowed to meet students because it was said we were a foreign influence,” Husain told me in a 2009 interview. The critics “wanted us to paint like the Bengal school” instead of breaking from tradition into new styles

La Terre, sold at Saffronart in 2014

Raza was born in 1922 in a remote rural village in Mandla district of Madhya Pradesh, in central India, near what is now Kanha National Park. His father was a forest ranger. After school he studied art in Nagpur, the nearest large city, and then in Mumbai where he had his first show when he was 24 at the Bombay Art Salon.

A 1948 meeting with the famous French photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson when he was 26 changed Raza’s outlook towards art. He showed his paintings to Cartier-Bresson, who said the work lacked construction. “If I hadn’t met Bresson, I would have continued painting white crosses to symbolise resurrection and black crosses for crucifixion,” Raza had said in a 2006 interview with India Today, explaining how he switched to geometrical patterns.

He went to Paris in 1950 on a French government scholarship. There, artists such as Cezanne, Monet and Gauguin fascinated him.

He stayed in Europe for some 60 years, returning from Paris only in 2010, by which time he was the celebrity that India was eager to claim as its own – as has been demonstrated in the past day with tributes from top politicians and across social media.

John Elliott is Asia Sentinel’s New Delhi correspondent. His blog, Riding the Elephant, can be found at the right side of Asia Sentinel’s home page