Biography of SAYED HAIDER RAZA

Achievements of S. H. Raza have made him as stable as the pole star. Undoubtedly, he is a star whose light can never be dimmed out.

Sayed Haider Raza is one of India's great icons. Founder of the Bombay Progressives, Raza rose like a meteor in the modernity of Indian art and in the contemporaneity of Indian art he stands as a metaphor for timelessness.

Sayed Haider Raza was born in Babaria, Mandla district, Madhya Pradesh, to Sayed Mohammed Razi, the Deputy Forest Ranger of the district and Tahira Begum, and it was here that he spent his early years and took to drawing at age 12; before moving to Damoh also in Madhya Pradesh at 13, where he completed his school education from Government High School, Damoh.

After his high school, he studied further at the Nagpur School of Art, Nagpur (1939–43), followed by Sir J. J. School of Art, Bombay (1943–47), before moving to France in October 1950 to study at the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts (ENSB-A) in Paris, 1950- 1953 on a Govt. of France scholarship. After his studies, he travelled across Europe, and continued to live and exhibit his work in Paris. He was later awarded the Prix de la critique in Paris in 1956, becoming the first non-French artist to receive the honour.

In December 1978, the Madhya Pradesh Government invited him to his native state for a homage and an exhibition of his works in Bhopal.

He was awarded the Padma Shri by the President of India in 1981 and was elected fellow of the Lalit Kala Academy, New Delhi in 1983.

S.H. Raza has been living in Paris and in Gorbio, A.M. France before recently returning to New Delhi, India where he now lives. Art career

Early career

Syed Haider Raza, had his first solo show in 1946 at Bombay Art Society Salon, and was awarded the Silver Medal of the society.

His work evolved from painting expressionistic landscapes to abstract ones. From his fluent water colours of landscapes and townscapes executed in the early 40's he moved towards a more expressive language painting landscapes of the mind.

1947 proved to be a very important year for him, at first his mother died, and this was also the year when he co-founded the revolutionary Bombay Progressive Artists' Group (PAG) (1947– 1956) along with K.H. Ara and F.N. Souza (Francis Newton Souza), which set out to break free from the influences of European realism in Indian art and bring Indian inner vision (Antar gyan) into the art, the group had its first show in 1948, the year his father died in Mandla and most of his family of four brothers and a sister migrated to Pakistan, after the partition of India. Once in France, he continued to experiment with currents of Western Modernism moving from Expressionist modes towards greater abstraction and eventually incorporating elements of Tantrism from Indian scriptures. Whereas his fellow contemporaries dealt with more figural subjects, Raza chose to focus on landscapes in the 1940s and 50s, inspired in part by a move to the France.

In 1959, he married French artist, Janine Mongillat, and three years later, in 1962, he became a visiting lecturer at the University of California in Berkeley, USA. Raza was initially enamored of the bucolic countryside of rural France. Eglise is part of a series which captures the rolling terrain and quaint village architecture of this region. Showing a tumultuous church engulfed by an inky blue night sky, Raza uses gestural brushstrokes and a heavily impasto-ed application of paint, stylistic devices which hint at his later 1970s abstractions.

His Indian canvases and the early French ones were realistic, like the visible world, resembling what most of us see daily. Like most Indian travelers, Raza moves comfortably and familiarly between east and west, for we tend to see most other places simply as extensions of our home and ourselves. Syed Haider Raza’s art was rooted in the twenties, a time when Hindustan had been colonized, was totally impoverished and people yearned for freedom. With tribal symbols, dreams of Paris, philosophies of freedom and colors, Raza and others in the Progressive Arts Group shuffled off colonial gallows and gave birth to modern Indian art. Ancient techniques and symbols, scorned by the British, were once again surfacing and shaping India’s artists. France was valued as a teacher of technique.

The 'Bindu' and beyond

By the 1970s Raza had grown increasingly unhappy and restless with his own work and wanted to find a new direction and deeper authenticity in his work, and move away from what he called the 'plastic art'. His trips to India, especially to caves of Ajanta - Ellora, followed by those Benaras, Gujarat and Rajasthan, made him study Indian culture more closely, and the result was 'Bindu', which signified his rebirth as a painter. The Bindu came forth in 1980, and took his work deeper and brought in, his new-found Indian vision and Indian ethnography. One of the reasons he attributes to the origin of the 'Bindu', have been his elementary school teacher, who on finding him lacking adequate concentration, drew a dot on the blackboard and asked him to concentrate on it.

This helped the child’s distracted mind and presumably he never forgot its impact.Great discerning minds and creative talent want to know things; they feel ideas, taste cool voyages and touch spirit. They say softly to themselves: Where did I come from, will I, someday, know what this was all about? Indians often ponder: Is this all there is to life? How does one measure magic, alchemy? How does one tell tales of contemplation, of silence? Raza seems to be on this quest, introspective and ultimately joyful for the hero’s quest is always for permanent bliss. His work represents the origins of life and symbols which tribal painters and highly sophisticated Indian philosophers have drawn, pondered and mulled over for millennia.

The Bindu symbolizes the seed, bearing the potential of all life . After the introduction of 'Bindu' (a point or the source of energy), he added newer dimensions to his thematic oeuvre in the following decades, with the inclusion of themes around the Tribhuj (Triangle), which bolstered Indian concepts of space and time, as well as that of 'prakriti-purusha' (the female and the male energy), his transformation from an expressionist to a master of abstraction and profundity, was complete. "My work is my own inner experience and involvement with the mysteries of nature and form which is expressed in colour, line, space and light". S. H. Raza

The unique energy vibrating with colour in his early landscapes are now more subtle but equally, if not more, dynamic. Raza abandoned the expressionistic landscape for a geometric abstraction and the 'Bindu'. Raza perceives the Bindu as the center of creation and existence progressing towards forms and colour as well as energy, sound, space and time.

His work took another leap in 2000, when he began to express his increasingly deepened insights and thoughts on Indian spiritual, and created works around the Kundalini, Nagas and the Mahabharat. Public contributions

He has also founded 'Raza Foundation' in India for promotion of art among Indian youth, which also gives away, Annual Raza Foundation Award, to young artists. Personal life

S. H. Raza married Janine Mongillat, his fellow student at Ecole de Beaux Arts in Paris and later became a well-known artist and sculptor. They married in 1959, and at the request of her mother not to leave France, Raza chose to remain. Janine died on April 5, 2002 in Paris. Awards

• 1946: Silver Medal, Bombay Art Society, Mumbai • 1948: Gold Medal, Bombay Art Society, Mumbai • 1956: Prix de la critique, Paris • 1981: Padma Shri; the Government of India • 1981: Fellowship of the Lalit Kala Akademi, New Delhi • 1981:Kalidas Samman, Government of Madhya Pradesh • 2007: Padma Bhushan; the Government of India • 2013: Padma Vibhushan; the Government of India