Sayed Haider Raza

Collection of Dr Jean-Louis Amiel

Ader Nordmann, Paris, 10 December 2014, lot 186

Private Collection, Australia

Saffronart, Spring Online Auction, 27-28 March 2019, lot 29

Private Collection

Acquired from the above, 2023

A. Macklin (ed.), SH Raza, Catalogue Raisonné, Volume I (1958 - 1971), Vadehra Art Gallery & The Raza Foundation, New Delhi, 2016, illustration p. 82

"... the chapels, churches and crosses [of the French countryside] touched me very deeply. I wanted my paintings to express the feeling of fervour and human tension that burned within me."

- Sayed Haider Raza

(M. Imbert, Raza: An Introduction to his Painting, Rainbow Publishers Ltd., New Delhi, 2003, p. 37)

Thick with impasto and executed with intense contrast and expressive brushstrokes, La Nuit is a masterwork from Sayed Haider Raza's early 1960s practice. Painted in 1962, this canvas dates to a pivotal moment in the artist’s career, before he shifted from oil to acrylic and from recognizable scenes to pure abstraction. In the present work, Raza deftly navigates the separation between representation and the intangible, to capture the beauty and serenity of the night.

Over the course of the mid to late 1950s, Raza’s paintings of the villages, churches and terrain of the French countryside became increasingly expressive. The painter’s planes of light ruptured and his palette gained a feverish intensity. As Raza’s compositions became more abstract, so did the theme. Time - its passing and its effect on the material world - became his recurring subject. Day, night, dawn and dusk, along with the changing seasons, were important inspirations, revealing the unending sequence of light and dark. Raza's free and expressive brushwork from this period mirrored the fleeting notion of time and the imperceptible yet continuous pulse of life. 

In the current lot, the ground of the canvas is a thickly applied, intense profusion of midnight blue. Raza's palette knife illuminates the darkness with daubs and strokes of white, yellow and red, creating the suggestion of a hillside village. The settlement is alight, perhaps from bright moonlight or a strike of lightening, and a subtle glow is cast into the sky above. 

La Nuit powerfully bridges the divide between Raza’s abstracted landscapes of the 50s and his profoundly Abstract Expressionist style of the mid-60s.