Before the Bindu: reading S. H. Raza's 1968 landscape

By 1968 Sayed Haider Raza had lived in France for eighteen years. The townscapes of Provence that had made his name in the 1950s — black skies, white walls, a church tower — were gone. What replaced them was heat.

The canvas offered as Lot 2 in Indian Spring is a landscape only in the loosest sense. Ochre and burnt orange are dragged across a deep green ground with a palette knife; the horizon is a suggestion. This is Raza thinking through the American Abstract Expressionists he had encountered on a 1962 visiting professorship at Berkeley, but thinking in the light of his childhood in the forests of Madhya Pradesh.

Why the pre-Bindu years matter

Within a decade Raza would arrive at the Bindu, the black point at the centre of a concentric universe that occupied him for the rest of his life. The paintings of the late 1960s are the bridge, and they are rare: he was working slowly and selling steadily, mostly to French collectors. Works from this period surface at auction perhaps two or three times a year.

Condition and provenance

This canvas has never been relined and shows no restoration under ultraviolet light. It was acquired directly from the artist in Paris and has remained in the same French collection since. The signature and date are lower right.

Bidding opens at £10,000 against an estimate of £10,000–15,000.