A Lesson in the Art of Contemplation

I Will Bring My Time:

Love Letters from Raza to Janine Mongillat, 1953–54

These are some of the letters by Raza we found among the material that he brought with him when he moved from Paris to Delhi in 2011. The fifty-odd letters to Janine Mongillat, whom he married in 1959 after almost a decade-long courtship, were found, with very few by Janine. He was an avid letter writer and spent a long time framing his letters. These love letters are no exception. Apart from revealing a depth of emotion, of longing and desire, these letters also reveal an aspect of Raza hardly noticed before. He effortlessly revealed his knowledge of writers such as Paul Valery, Charles Baudelaire, Andre Gide, and so on, by quoting from them. He also articulated, in depth, an expansiveness in his ideas about life, art, time, and worldly circumstances in his letters, to someone he loved, and who was to become his life-companion. A small selection is being presented here.

A. V.

Others on Raza

Ranjit Hoskote —

Ranjit Hoskote is a cultural theorist, curator and poet. He is the author of more than 25 books and two collections of poetry.

Over the seven decades of his practice, S.H. Raza became an indispensable cartographer of lost continents of meaning, a bridge-maker who recalls us to an awareness of those devices of sensuous knowledge, and of gnosis, that some have perhaps been too eager to abandon to the museum of superseded ideas. Raza was also a pilgrim in the realms of philosophy and poetics: through his paintings, he tested out various propositions concerning the relationships between image and resonance, poetry and abstraction, colour and memory.

We may discern the unfolding inner logic of Raza’s practice in the transition that he made from the formally accomplished Kashmir landscapes and French townscapes, produced in the first phase of his career, to the vital and pulsating symbolism that eventually came to distinguish the art of his maturity, its lavish chromatic and textural sensuality engaged in productive interplay by an austere geometry signalling to the forms of cosmography. In Raza’s paintings, the eye dwells on a series of concentric circles that build into mandalas; on the double helix, which signifies both the closely intertwined serpents of India’s chthonic fertility religions and the abiding symbol of the human DNA; on the cobalt flow of the river, laid against the umbers and sienna of the terraced and furrowed earth; and on the rising arrow of stacked herringbones, marking the symbiosis and synergy linking earth, prithvi, with the empyrean, akasha.

Raza did not simply relay a received trove of symbolism into the present. Rather, he created symbols that carry us across the disruptions of contemporary living, towards an appreciation of the contemplative continuities that can restore us to wholeness. Constantly, he refashioned for us archetypal reminders of our relationship to the larger framing contexts of our lives, presenting us with evocations of the life-force and the elements from which it gathers dynamic impetus—of time and of eternity.

Raza’s paintings are dramatic foci, intended to heal our fragmented attention and our broken faculties of cognition, and endow them with coherence. Regarded in this light, his works are charged with the power of the threshold, crossing which, we enter a space of dream and transformation. The paintings are not subject to the rise and fall of fashions; their relevance lies not in what they are, but in what they do. At their best, Raza’s paintings are not nouns that burden memory; they are verbs that act directly and palpably on the viewing consciousness.

This text was previously published in Ashok Vajpeyi (ed.), Understanding Raza: Many Ways of Looking at a Master, New Delhi: Vadehra Art Gallery, 2013.

Raza’s Notebooks

Janine and Raza

Raza met Janine Mongillat at the art school in Paris, where he was studying on a scholarship from the French government. After nearly a decade-long courtship, the two got married in 1959.

Janine was, compared to Raza, a more experimental artist who used a lot of unusual materials to create art, including tea-bags, wooden toys from Benaras, almirahs and throw-away objects. Raza admitted that he came to understand some of the metaphysical aspects of Christianity through her. Raza used to visit the church where Janine was baptized, close to the Rue de Charonne, every Sunday, and they visited India many times together. Janine took part in many salons in Paris, and her solo shows took place in Paris, Berkeley, Milan, Grenoble, Menton, Saint-Remyde-Provence. They worked in separate studios, both in Paris and Gorbio. They were deeply involved in the restoration of the twelfth-century chateau in Gorbio and its conversion into an arts centre, and gifted several of their works as well other artists’ from their collection to the centre.

Janine was greatly admired among friends for her frankness, generosity, artistic views that were quite different from those of Raza as well as her enthusiastic hospitality. She was Raza’s true life companion. Janine passed away in 2002.

La Terre (detail), 1977 Courtesy: Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, New Delhi (See, p. 235)

The Catalogue

Village Corse, 1957 Oil on canvas, 80 × 160 cm Courtesy: Musée d'ethnographie de Genève, Johnathan Watts