Raza's rang make a splash in Paris

Iconic show celebrating the famous Indian modernist painter opens at Centre Pompidou

Indian artist Syed Haider Raza’s French odyssey can actually be traced back to a meeting with photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson who told him to study the works of the French painter Paul Cezanne. In 1950, the 28-year-old, armed with a scholarship, set off from Mumbai to Paris, and stayed on for six decades. If France taught him construction, the vibrancy of his palette of primary colours was unique to him. On February 15, the walls of Centre Pompidou in Paris will come alive with Raza’s rang as part of the largest-ever exhibition of his work.

It’s a historic exhibition and, perhaps, the biggest show of a modernist Indian painter in France,” says Ashok Vajpayee, managing trustee of the Raza Foundation, who has played a key role in organising the retrospective. Besides works from the Raza Foundation, the show will have 90 works from across the world, including the Peabody Essex Museum, the Piramal Foundation and the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art.

Among the paintings on show is ‘Saurashtra’ which, in 2010, set a record for the most expensive Indian painting ever sold. “There are works like ‘Maa’ that have never been publicly shown. Even I haven’t seen it though it has a line from one of my poems inscribed on the canvas in Devnagari,” says Vajpayee, who was one of the artist’s closest friends and by his side when he passed away in Delhi in 2016. The evocative line he is referring to reads: ‘Ma, lautkar jab aaonga, tab kya laoonga’ (Mother, what shall I bring you when I come back).

In an interview to TOI after his return to Delhi, Raza told this reporter that he had discovered his idiom only in the eighties. “One day I told myself, Raza, you have become a French painter. Where is the Indian in your work?” That became the starting point of his journey to rediscover his Indian roots. The son of a forest-ranger who grew up in a village in Mandla, Madhya Pradesh, he was inspired by his memories. The lush forests and the Narmada river he grew up around featured in many of his landscapes. As for his signature bindu, his first experience of it was when a teacher marked a dot for him to meditate on. It went on to become one of his major preoccupations.

Even in Paris, Raza had this deep yearning for home, says Yashodhara Dalmia, art historian, curator and author of a biography of Raza. “He remained distinctive because he archived his roots and he created works that were part of global modernism but at the same time very Indian,” says Dalmia, who has also curated a new show at Delhi’s Dhoomimal Gallery titled ‘Raza and His Contemporaries’. Her attempt, she says, is to spotlight the ’grand generation of Indian art’ such as Raza, Souza, Gaitonde, Himmat Shah, Swaminathan etc. “This generation showed the direction Indian art would take,” she says.

So, it’s fitting that the celebration of Raza’s oeuvre has gone beyond the Pompidou. Even the Musee Guimet and INALCO institute in Paris are showcasing Raza works and a French book on his love for nature will be launched. “Raza used to say, ‘How to paint I learnt in France but what to paint I learnt from India’, says Vajpayee, hopeful that the country of his birth would one day host an equally big retrospective of his work.