Interview

“The great art” of the Indian painter SH Raza celebrated at the Center Pompidou

View of the works “Nagas” (1998) and “Bindu” (1986) in the exhibition “SH Raza” at the Center Pompidou.

© Siegfried Forster / RFI

Text by: Siegfried Forster Follow

11 mins

How to speak of a dialogue of cultures when entire civilizations remain neglected in the globalized space of contemporary creation?

Very few know the name of Sayed Haider Raza (1922-2016).

Yet the Indian artist is recognized as one of the greatest modern painters, he was part of the School of Paris and lived for decades in France.

Finally, the Center Pompidou-Paris is devoting the first major retrospective to him in France, with around a hundred works, most of which from Indian collections.

Interview with Catherine David, general curator of the museums of France and curator of the exhibition.

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Raza is a very important Indian modern artist.

He has the particularity of belonging to an extremely traveling generation.

He lived and worked for more than fifty years in France.

He returned to India in 2011. This exhibition is not the first exhibition mounted in France, but it is the first retrospective exhibition in a major museum.

Which nevertheless questions our relationship to non-Euro-American artists who have lived and worked in our beautiful country.

Raza is known to have been a member of the

in India and the School of Paris in France.

He was the first foreigner to receive the Critics' Prize in Paris in 1956. Why is he considered one of the major painters of the 20th century

In India, Raza is definitely considered one of the great masters of modern art.

But also in France and the United States.

Just look at the state of his work on the art markets.

He is an extremely well-regarded painter, in great demand, and that not only in India.

For what ?

He is identified as a great modern painter by the use of abstraction, by the development of extremely virtuoso and very contrasting colored ranges which refer to the tradition of the use of colors in India.

So he is a relatively easy transaction artist between the Euro-American world and the Indian world.

For Europeans, he is a painter who uses identifiable and recognized forms, valued, with ranges of colors which are not quite those of the School of Paris.

And for the Indians,

The exhibition begins with a photo from 1947/48 showing Raza, aged 25, in his studio in Bombay.

Where is he at this time in his artistic process

It's a very nice photo, taken in a workshop that produced calendars.

He worked a lot making watercolor landscapes, some are displayed next to the photo.

It is a watercolor practice that the Indians inherited from the English by putting a touch to it that comes from the art of miniature in Rajasthan from the 17th to the 19th century and other pictorial practices.

Born in Madhya Pradesh [

], for Raza, the cultural capital Bombay is an important stage.

At the beginning of his life as an artist, he also worked for commercial productions with watercolors, Indian landscapes produced for notebooks and calendars distributed and sold by industrial companies.

He co-founded the Progressive Artists' Group in 1947. What was the ambition of this group of Indian artists who wanted to find new forms of artistic expression after India's independence

In the beginning, there are these three artists that we see in the photo: Maqbool Fida Husain, Francis Newton Souza and Sayed Haider Raza.

Afterwards, it expanded very quickly.

There were different waves that put other artists around the founding group.

According to Ranjit Hoskote, a very important Indian poet and critic, the Progressive Artists' Group was more a moment than a movement.

That is to say, artists come together at a certain time to have another visibility, to present their work differently.

But when you look, they are very different works.

We will never confuse a Raza with a Souza or a Husain.

And it's a moment that will quickly slip away.

Raza goes to Paris.

Soza leaves for London, Hussain will stay in India and become the great painter of modern history.

After,

What prompted his departure for Paris in 1950?

Is it the attraction for the School of Paris and the artistic dynamism of the French capital or rather the attraction for the practice of the nude which was prohibited in India

There were several of these reasons given.

First, Raza had obtained a scholarship to study in Paris.

It was not at all a whim, because we noticed his efforts: he learned French, obtained a scholarship... He came to see what is happening in Paris, was enrolled in the School of Fine Arts, but without being a student.

The original idea was to spend some time there.

Afterwards, he will spend seven years in Paris before returning to India.

As soon as he has more means, he regularly returns to India.

We can say that he never left India.

When you read his exchanges, in his head, he lives as much in India as in Paris.

In his notebooks, you have French, English and Hindi.

It is very rare to have a page where there are not the three languages.

His work is crossed by a very deep black – often called “mother color” in Indian thought – and a very luminous red.

Are these the two key colors in his work

There are several of them.

India has extraordinary colors and equally extraordinary color combinations.

But black is still a very important element, linked to certain symbols.

For example the black of the famous bindu circle that you see on the forehead of women.

Indeed, there are times when there is more red than others.

In the first part, you have more works echoing Nicolas de Staël, Bernard Buffet, have certain color ranges.

And from certain moments when he begins to rediscover or to look at the miniature, the ranges change, until the arrival of ochres, orange trees… as, for example, in the magnificent Maa (Mother), the very

painting from 1981, which has never been shown since it was bought by a very good Indian collection.

Earth and night are among his favorite themes.

Raza knows the mythology, the great Indian books, but also the Koranic texts perfectly, because we must not forget that he was born into a Muslim family and that all his family, except him, left for Pakistan at the time of the partition.

He was also very interested in the great texts of Christianity, it is no coincidence that we have this whole series of churches at the start of the exhibition.

He is very knowledgeable about the sacred texts.

This is the subtlety, the great art.

He associates this with a whole process of subjectification in relation to his emotions, to his psychic state.

He is a man who has moments of extreme exaltation, moments of extreme melancholy.

He condenses all of this into universal themes, such as the night, the earth...

After landscapes, churches, figurative paintings, how did he arrive at abstraction, at the motif of the bindu [“drop”, “point”, “seed” in Sanskrit]

The first years in Paris, there is still a relationship to certain miniatures, the work on the body, you have landscapes which, little by little, become abstract, but we still see houses, horizon lines.

We see a landscape that is being deconstructed.

Afterwards, he is completely in a very colorful abstraction.

Color is as important as the explosion of shapes.

And from a certain point in the mid-1970s, his work focused on meditation and simplification.

He will develop a certain number of works from very simple geometric figures and signs: the bindu, the sign of the snake.

He arrives at very simple compositions, but which can be very agitated by the color.

Many of the works in this exhibition come from museums and collections in India.

How is Raza received in India

The dominant comes from Indian collections.

We have done our best to integrate into the exhibition the few important works which, in time, had been purchased by French collections, the majority of the exhibition comes from Indian collections.

Now, even the School of Paris periods are bought by the Indians who had rather started with the "bindu" period of the end.

Ten years ago, on the occasion of the

exhibition , the Center Pompidou spoke of a transformation into a “globalised” museum.

You were deputy director of the National Museum of Modern Art at the Center Pompidou and directed the Research and Globalization Department from 2014 to 2021. What place does India occupy today in this globalized museum of the Center Pompidou

In my opinion, modern Indian art is still not valued.

Here, I'm not talking about my colleagues or people who have understood for a long time that it is one of the most contrasting, most powerful modern arts.

The fact that the majority of Indian art is figurative, for me it's not a problem, but for some people it is.

You just have to bear in mind that when you see a human form in an Indian painting, it can be a figure, it can be a portrait of a person, it can be a god, and that raises extremely interesting questions.

There are a lot of things to rethink.

Starting with the fact that just because it's abstract doesn't mean it's more modern, smarter, more progressive, etc.

Many of India's great modern works are in India.

There are very large private museums, such as the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art (KNMA) in Delhi, which lent us around twenty works.

One of the possible futures could be that we exchange sections so that we can see the works in their context, their evolution, their complexity, etc., and not a hostage work of which we do not know where it comes from. comes and where it goes… and that we can do this for relatively long periods of time.

Anyway, very large exhibitions are becoming more and more complicated, given the cost of insurance and transport problems.

And the goal is to integrate Indian modern art as quickly as possible into the great corpus of 20th century modern art, of which it is one of the major elements.

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► On April 3 at 7 p.m., the Center Pompidou will screen the film:

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