Sayed Haider Raza

Born in Madhya Pradesh in 1922, Sayed Haider Raza pursued artistic education at both the Nagpur School of Art and the Sir J. J. School of Art. At the latter institution, Raza was one of the co-founders of the Progressive Artists’ Group, which was created to further explore the precepts of modernism that were not encouraged in Indian art schools at the time.

In 1950, Sayed Haider Raza left for Paris with a bursary from the French Government to study at the École Nationale des Beaux-Arts in Paris. While in Paris, Raza achieved commercial success and in 1956 was awarded the prestigious Prix de La Critique, which provided Raza with international recognition. During his stay in France, Raza was moved by the post-impressionists; Vincent Van Gogh, Paul Cezanne and Paul Gaugin. He started to use more oil-based pigments and his work became more about the mood that color evoked.

In 1962, Raza moved to America to teach at Berkeley, where he encountered many American painters, including Sam Francis, Jackson Pollok and Mark Rothko, and began to paint with abstract narratives and a deeper sense of spatial recession.

Raza's abstract landscapes of the 1970s and early 1980s were influenced not only by the French countryside, but also represented a visual expression of the artist's own meditations, clearly inspired by childhood memories of India. "Sometime between 1975 and 1980, I began to feel the draw of my Indian heritage. I thought: I come from India, I have a different vision; I should incorporate what I have learned in France with Indian concepts. In this period, I visited India every year to study Indian philosophy, iconography, magic diagrams (yantras), and ancient Indian art, particularly Hindu, Buddhist, and Jain art. I was impressed by paintings from Basholi, Malwa, and Mewar, and began combining colours in a manner that echoed Indian miniature painting." (S.H. Raza in conversation with Amrita Jhaveri, Sotheby's Preview, March/April 2007 p. 57).

Throughout the 1980s, Raza moved towards formal geometric compositions dominated by their color and shape. He started to use more earthy tones rather than his earlier brightly painted compositions. “For black was the mother of all colors and the one from which all others were born. It was also the void from which sprang the manifest universe [...] Some of the most haunting works of this period are those which evoke the night [...] where the liminal sheaths of black are illuminated by sparks of white light [...] As with Mark Rothko, black is one of the richest colors in Raza’s palette and signifies a state of fulsomeness. However, for both painters, colors plumb the depths and are not simply used for their own sake.” (Y. Dalmia, ‘The Subliminal World of Raza’, A Life in Art: S.H. Raza, Art Alive, New Delhi, 2007, p. 197).

In 2001, Raza founded the Raza Foundation in New Delhi, which holds an annual awards ceremony that seeks to recognize and encourage burgeoning Indian artists. Raza had several solo exhibitions throughout the course of his career and also won numerous accolades, including the Padma Shri (1981), the Lalit Kala Akademi Fellowship (1981), the Kalidas Samman (1997), the Lalit Kala Ratna Puraskar (2004), the Padma Bhushan (2007), the Padma Vibhushan (2013) and Commandeur de la Légion d’Honneur (2015). In 2023, a career retrospective was held at the Centre Pompidou in Paris with nearly 100 of his works.

Sayed Haider Raza passed away in New Delhi in 2016.