Introduction

The language of visual abstraction did not originate in the 20th century. It forms part of a primordial symbolism in art, to express the ineffable, that which cannot be grasped by any other means but by representing the pure essence of what is conceived. Paintings by Raza contribute to this vision of transcendence.

In India, the use of symbols and signs is sanctified by an ancient legacy of visual abstraction. Geometric symbols are used as yantra: as the power diagram by which the physics and metaphysics of the world are made to coincide with the psyche of the mediator. Islamic calligraphy in Persia and across the world reveals the use of abstraction, to help us contemplate the divine. Hence the prolific use of arches in courtyards and in mosques–as also in churches. They allow us to raise ourselves above daily life and consider life beyond the immediate. Quite apart from graphic symbols, there is reverence in India in wayside shrines of stones, for the lingam and the salagrama, which serve as abstract depictions of the gods Shiva and Vishnu.

Sufis have sung about the significance of light as a spiritual substance. This mystical experience of light finds concrete expression in medieval Christian and Islamic architecture. Sunlight filters through to interiors, and stone screens create the play of light and shadow on walls and floors and ceilings. In almost every civilization, celestial geography visualizes the universe in terms of pure geometry, the only means by which planetary spheres can be mapped. The same elements mentioned by the Neoplatonists of the Graeco-Roman world are those of earth, water, fire and air, along with the fifth of the sky or akasa, which constitute the pancha tattvas or the five elements in Indian thought and compose everything that exists in the world.

The fear for the contemporary artist in Western abstraction has been that they end up creating art without meaning, “that he may be making mere abstraction”

(Rosalind Krauss, “Grids” in The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths, MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1985, p. 237). This is perhaps one major reason that the pioneers of abstract art in 20th-century Europe—Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky, Kasimir Malevich and Mondrian— explained in their manifestos the “meaning” behind their work. Debates in Paris in the 1950s were heated on the originality of abstract art, by artists from Matisse, Cezanne to Ferdinand Leger. Abstraction, its values and purpose, has been discussed, debated and defended by critics such as Greenberg and Arnheim.

In India, abstraction has been practised for centuries in the visual arts and in music, with just the repetition of a single mantra, such as Om. There is no need to defend the status or the position of abstraction. The representation of the abstract in contemporary art has been powerful, articulated early in the 20th century by Rabindranath Tagore and artists such as Nirode Mazumdar and Paritosh Sen in post-Independence Bengal. A new direction was taken by Swaminathan in the 1960s to turn to Adivasi paintings, and by Ram Kumar and Gaitonde in Delhi and Bombay. The remarkable soliloquies by Prabhakar Barwe in Bombay create their own music of abstraction. The potentials of abstraction were explored in different mediums, with Sohan Qadri in Copenhagen and Zarina Hashmi in New York. This listing of some of the leading artists who played a significant role in abstraction in India is already an impressive number, without even mentioning those from Chennai, Baroda and Trivandrum.

Raza remained always—from the beginning to the end of his career—a painter of landscapes, as his near-contemporary Gaitonde mentioned. But it was only in the 1980s that Raza began to explore the potency of landscape in abstraction. He and Gade were the only artists among the original six of the Bombay Progressives to explore “landscape” in its purity. Raza extended his vision to projecting the wholeness of the world, the earth, the sea and sky, to conceive the whole cosmos

in harmony. In his later paintings, he reaches beyond the scope of the Bombay Progressives. In conceiving this perspective, he had absorbed fundamentals of Indian aesthetics—with colouration and a compositional order that eschews realistic representation.

In 1947, three artists who formed the core group of the Bombay Progressives moved to spend some years in Europe: Francis Newton Souza, Sayed Haider Raza and, a few years later, Maqbool Fida Husain in London. Also living in Paris in the same years was Akbar Padamsee. A group photograph taken in 1952 shows the three in a studio in Montparnasse in Paris, along with their paintings. It is a remarkable study of three young Indians in the 1950s: Souza, Raza and Padamsee, suggesting already their differing temperaments and the character in their work, which is beginning to be defined. Both Souza and Padamsee turn to figurative expression, largely as defined then in European Art. Raza’s canvas in the photograph is his celebrated painting Haut de Cagnes, which makes use of the brilliant Indian yellow-ochre found in miniature paintings and a space order that defies reality.

The raw colours of expressionism in European paintings left its impact on Raza’s depiction of churches: Chapelle Bleue and Eglise at Calvaise Breton, 1956. According to critics such as Lassaine, Soupault and Waldemar George, his works did not fit into any category of Western art or into what they described as neoorientalism, but they were moved by his passionate outbursts of energy. There was an inherent dilemma for Raza who was living in Paris. A new world order of ambivalence seemed to have become inevitable, when the East was turning Westward for influence, while the West was moving Eastward for inspiration.

I was fortunate to have met Raza Sahib in the 1980s, in the crucial decade when he was embarking on rediscovering the significance of the Bindu. It

“The first lesson I learnt after visiting the galleries was that I had not understood what modern art is all about; so, I had to make a fresh beginning. This did me good. Modern sensibility is mainly about the formal values of line and form and colour. Suddenly I realized that all this was already there, existing in Indian painting! The twodimensionality of objects, on a single plane, the space divisions of colour, and the arbitrary use of colour orchestration. I began looking at the art of my own country with new eyes.”

—S.H. Raza

Ankuran: Germination

Hidden in nature, which is mine own, I emanate forth again and again All these multitude of beings Necessarily by the force of nature.

—Bhagavad Gita IX, 8