A recipient of the Padma Vibhushan, India’s second-highest civilian award, which artist from Madhya Pradesh co-founded the revolutionary Progressive Artists’ Group in 1947?

Sayed Haider Raza (22 February 1922 – 23 July 2016) was an Indian painter who lived and worked in France since 1950, while maintaining strong ties with India. He was born in Babaria, Central Provinces, British India, which is now present-day Madhya Pradesh.

He was a renowned Indian artist. He was awarded the Padma Shri and Fellowship of the Lalit Kala Academi in 1981, Padma Bhushan in 2007 and Padma Vibhushan in 2013. He was conferred with the Commandeur de la Legion d’honneur (Legion of Honour) on July 14, 2015.

His work evolved from painting expressionistic landscapes to abstract ones. From his fluent water colours of landscapes and townscapes executed in the early 1940s, he moved toward a more expressive language, painting landscapes of the mind.

In 1962, he became a visiting lecturer at the University of California in Berkeley, USA. Raza was initially enamored of the bucolic countryside of rural France. Eglise is part of a series which captures the rolling terrain and quaint village architecture of this region. Showing a tumultuous church engulfed by an inky blue night sky, Raza uses gestural brushstrokes and a heavily impasto-ed application of paint, stylistic devices which hint at his later 1970s abstractions.

 

Picture Credit : Google