On his centenary, the gallerist Sharan Apparao looked at the time he spent with the painter and his wife, and a significant display of his works which he curated
On his centenary, the gallerist Sharan Apparao looked at the time he spent with the painter and his wife, and a significant display of his works which he curated
As the Indian art fraternity celebrates the centenary of Syed Haider Raza (he was born on February 22, 1922), I remember his first major retrospective I did. It was at the Jehangir Art Gallery in 2002, and it surprised many collectors, who had expected at least the first South Indian gallery to produce something of this magnitude.
The truth was that till that time there was little interest in him. After meeting Raza at the Jahangir Gallery in 1985, at the only major show by modernist painter Bal Chhabra (performed by members of the Progressive Artists’ Group, or PAG, which Raza co-founded in 1947), I developed an interest in him, While other friends from his gallery left him (the second generation who took over the gallery looked at the works of young artists).
SH Raza at Delhi’s Vadehra Art Gallery in 2014. photo credit: Getty Images
When we were working on the 2002 show – to celebrate his eighty birthday – he let me see what a treasure. I climbed the stairs of his house, dived into his loft, and pulled out all sorts of things. From his early days there were drawings and sketches and drawings. I found a board in which the work of Raza was written on Akbar Padamsee. It was a painting similar to Raza’s paperwork from the same period, with Padamsee’s signature on the front and Raza’s on the back! They all shared studios, and if you look at the works of Raza, Padamsee and FN Souza from the 50s (members of PAG), they were very similar to each other. They were friends, their lives intertwined with influences from Paris and its surroundings.
Straddling India and France
We had a friendship of several decades, made several trips to France to meet him and his beloved wife, Janine Mongilat. He forbade me to stay with his friends in Paris; It was always in her Rue de Charon apartment, where the guest room was in Janine’s studio. It was in a renovated old convent, where they had a much larger floor that housed the couple’s home and studio, which they shared with their cat, Bonnard.
Raza’s journey began with his birth in Mandla, a tribal village in Madhya Pradesh, leading to a scholarship to the cole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris, where he met his artist wife. To the dismay of her parents, she married the son of an Indian artist and a forest ranger – who stayed to study philosophy and the work of the Post-Impressionist painter Cézanne on the advice of the photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson – and He remained his strongest supporter until 2002, when he lost him to cancer.
Raza’s ‘Sansari’ (1994), part of the ‘Bindu’ series. photo credit: special arrangement
Janine put her art career aside (showing occasionally) to aid and support Raza’s journey. As I became acquainted with her body of work on several visits as a house guest in her studio bedroom, I realized how strong her work was and recognized the sacrifice she made for her husband’s career.
Raza was the maestro in the house who dominated the conversation, but when we two women bonded, he and I would go shopping and talk about everything he didn’t share with her in India. It was Janine who introduced me to Paris, my favorite city, and the streets I am now very familiar with.
moon and point
This artist couple in the ’90s, when hardly anyone from the Indian art world visited them, gave me fond memories of both Paris and Gorbio in southern France, where they had their summer home. There his studio, in a lovely little hut in the mountains (which still stands today), had a view of the Cte d’Azur.
Sharan Apparao with Raza | photo credit: special arrangement
My favorite Gorbio story is when, on one of my summer trips, I asked Raza about an unusual painting above the door in the studio. It was green and orange, a contrast from his drawings of bold primary geometrics. As soon as I saw him surprised, he said that it was the orange moon. Having never seen one, I told myself it was an image of his mind. That night we were walking to the only restaurant in the village for dinner, and look, I see this big orange ball in the sky. I shouted, to which Raza politely said, “Look, I told you that.” Some in the Mediterranean air colored it, which was probably one of the reasons why this element, mixed with imagery from Tantric art, became Raza. le motif After the 80s.
After making his home in Paris, he realized that he had to stand apart and bring something strong to his art. His interaction with the painter-sculptor Velu Viswanathan and his experience of Ajit Mukherjee’s writings on tantric art allowed him to translate these ideas and combine them with his essence. The black sun in his abstract landscapes of the 70s became the ‘point’ in his works from the 90s – a part of his exploration of nature which he made his own and is now known to all of us. The motives he used over and over again, he told me, were a chant (Japa), which was refined each time and gradually developed.
Raza would have turned a hundred this week (he died in 2016), and his thoughts Seed (seed) and the emptiness of the womb – the cycle of life and death – still continues. circle is circle, the dotBeginnings and endings, and what they gave to the Indian art world.
Sharan Apparao is a curator and gallerist, and the founder of Apparao Galleries in Chennai and New Delhi.
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