Prominent Indian modernist SH Raza lands first public museum retrospective at Center Pompidou in Paris

One of India’s best-known modernist painters, the late SH Raza, is receiving his greatest retrospective at the Center Pompidou in Paris. SH Raza (1922-2016) (until May 15) is the artist’s first major monographic exhibition, as well as the first to take place in a public institution, and brings together more than 90 works in the capital of his second home.

The Pompidou show covers the entire career of the artist, from his beginnings in the 1940s in Mumbai (then called Bombay), where he was one of the founding members of the very influential Bombay Progressives Artists’ Group, until his installation in France in 1950, where he would be based intermittently for the rest of his life, and where he developed a style that blended post-war French and American painting with the miniature traditions of Rajasthan. His subjects ranged from countryside landscapes and churches to Indian temple congregations, Islamic architecture and Western cityscapes; eventually it moved on to its more abstract – and arguably best-known – period which dates from the late 1960s and incorporates elements of Tantrism drawn from South Asian scriptures.

“Raza often told me: ‘How I paint, I learned it from France, but what I paint, I get it from India'”, explains Ashok Vajpeyi, executive administrator of the Raza Foundation, created by the artist in 2001. stylistic evolution charted by the show, he says Raza was picked up by a Parisian gallerist in the mid-1950s and soon began using oil paints and a palette knife, mimicking the techniques of European Post-Impressionist masters such as Cézanne. But “he remained, above all, a painter of inner nature” and “a master colorist in a way very few have done in India, at least,” says Vajpeyi. The overall result is, he adds, an “alternative modernism – not of rupture and tension, but of peace and harmony, which is quite different from that of its peers in France and India.”

The staging of this show is a major blow for the Raza Foundation, which had worked for more than five years to pitch and organize it. According to Vajpeyi, the exhibition was also offered to the National Gallery of Modern Art in Delhi, India’s most important museum of 19th and 20th century art, but the institution did not accept the proposal. Vajpeyi declines to comment on why he thinks the NGMA did not agree. A spokesperson for NGMA Delhi also declined to comment on the matter.

The foundation also played a central role in a series of exhibitions in India which took place in 2022, the year of the centenary of Raza’s birth, in three private Indian museums: the Piramal Museum of Art and the Jehangir Nicholson Art. Foundation, both in Mumbai, and the Kiran Nadar Art Museum in Delhi. The three museums are the main lenders of the exhibition, supported by other loans from a number of private collectors, including dealers Amrita Jhaveri, co-founder of Jhaveri Contemporary and Roshini Vadehra, director of the Vadehra Art Gallery.

The Center Pompidou is one of the few in the West to have a significant collection of the artist, about ten, some of which are included in the exhibition. Yet, although Pompidou also has one of the most important collections of French modernism in the world, none of these works have been included to contextualize Raza with his peers and heroes. Defending this choice, the show’s co-curator, Diane Tourbet, says: “People already know about these works, but they hardly know Raza in the West, when he spent so much time here.”

Highlights of the exhibition include the gray abstract The rain (1964) from the collection of prominent South Asian art collectors Jane and Kito de Boer, and the orange hue Saurashtra (1983), one of his largest canvases, named after a region in southern Gujurat and on loan from the KNMA. It became the most expensive work by an Indian artist at auction when the museum acquired it for £2.4 million from Christie’s in London in 2010.

Indeed, the artist’s first major European exhibition is also helping to bridge the gap between his exhibition history and his burgeoning market. Like many of his Bombay Progressive peers, Raza’s work continues to dominate South Asian auctions, both internationally and domestically. Roshini Vadehra, director of the Vadehra Art Gallery in Delhi, points out that the Bombay Progressives were one of the few groups of artists whose prices rebounded quickly after the recession of the 2000s, and have remained strong ever since. But the institutional reception of these artists, both at home and abroad, has “never quite matched” these awards, she says. “The Indian market and museums do not have a strong connection like in the West, because we do not have institutions. But the works in this exhibition are of exceptional quality and this exhibition proves Raza’s place in the world. cannon.”