Page 84 - Pundole's Auction M0015

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SYED HAIDER RAZA

1922?–?2016

Corse

Oil on canvas
1958
21½ × 14? in. (54.5 × 37.8 cm.)

Signed and dated ‘RAZA ’58’ lower right and further
inscribed ‘RAZA “CORSE” / 10 P / P no 154 - 58’ on
a label on reverse

??40,00,000?–?60,00,000

$ 59,700?–?89,550

PROVENANCE:
Originally purchased from Galerie Dresdnere, Montreal in
October 1958.

LITERATURE:
A. Macklin, ed., S.H. Raza Catalogue Raissone 1958–1971
(Volume 1), New Delhi, 2016, p.?15, P154, illustrated.

Corse is Raza’s homage to the small but beautiful French
island of Corsica. Painted with the vibrant brushstrokes and
rich palette that characterised his landscapes of this period,
he has captured several of the island’s defining elements
including the rugged mountains, the deep valleys, and the
typical stone and brick houses that dot the entire
landscape. Moving away from the more structured, formal
landscapes of the early 1950s, it is around this period that
Raza begins to fully discover and exploit the possibilities
that colour, and oil paint in particular, offered.

Describing the dense, rich landscapes of this period,
Richard Bartholomew states, ‘Colour is the legend to each
of these landscapes, because in each painting the flesh and
form of colour are organic to the skeletal structure, we see
the anatomy but not the division of the drawing. Therefore,
there is no seductive line to give you the sense of the thing.
Trees, houses, roads, streams, the undulations of the land,
the falling shadows, the perpendicularity, the levelness, the
foreground, and the horizon all shift and throb with the life
of colour, and the scene is not static. There is hardly a patch
of colour that is passive… What Raza really shows us of a
landscape is what we would remember of it.’ (Richard
Bartholomew, ‘Paintings by S.H. Raza’, Thought, May 16,
1959, reproduced in Richard Bartholomew, The Art Critic,
New Delhi, 2012, p. 339)

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