Syed Haider Raza

Syed Haider Raza, born in 1922 in Babaria (MP) studied painting in the Nagpur School of Art and the J. J. School of Art, Bombay. A founder member of the Progressive Artists Group, he presented several exhibitions of his paintings in India before leaving for France on a French government scholarship in 1950. Raza studied painting at the Ecole Nationale des Beaux-Arts in Paris from 1950 to 1953.

In 1956, S.H Raza was awarded the Prix de la Critique in Paris. He has put on numerous individual exhibitions of his paintings and has participated in group shows including the International Biennales at Venice, Sao Paolo and Menton, and in the Triennale at New Delhi. In 1959, he married the French artist Janine Mongillat. Three years later, in 1962, he visited the University of California at Berkeley asa visiting lecturer in the art department. He revisited India several times between 1959 and 1985. Since then he has visited India every
year to establish a tangible relationship with Indian concepts, contemporary art and life.

Raza's "Cityscape" (1946) and "Baramulla in Ruins" (1948) show his sorrow and anguish over the partition of Hindustan and the suffering of Muslims in Mumbai during the riots.

In December 1978, the government of Madhya Pradesh invited him to his native state for a homage and an exhibition of his works in Bhopal. S.H.Raza was awarded the Padma Shri by the President of India in 1981, and was elected a Fellow of the Lalit Kala Akademi, New Delhi, in 1983. Since then he has received the Kalidas Samman from the government of Madhya Pradesh and a retrospective of his paintings has been presented at the Bharat Bhavan in Bhopal.

S.H. Raza lives and works in Paris and Gorbio, in Southern France.

Satish Gupta - Modern Indian Artist

Satish Gupta, artist, sculptor and poet, has exhibited his work in numerous one-man shows at galleries within India and abroad. Born in 1947 in New Delhi, Satish Gupta studied art for five years at the College of Art, New Delhi.

He moved to Paris on a scholarship to study graphics and stayed there for two formative years, from 1970 to 1972. At present, he lives in New Delhi and works from his studio Zazen, in Gurgaon. He writes a regular column “Zen Black, Zen White” for the First City magazine, published from Delhi.

In over 30 solo shows in India, his works have been displayed in Delhi, Mumbai, Chennai, Pondicherry, Bangalore and Calcutta. His works are in important private collections and museums including the National Gallery of Modern Art, and a 260 ft. long mural at the International airport at New Delhi.

Group Shows of Satish Gupta-

Tao of Shiva curated by Kalpana Shah & Vimla Patil, Tao Art Gallery, Mumbai, March 2004 Indian Art Unleashed curated by Nitin and Anjali Bhalla for Nitanjali Art Gallery, London, June 2004 Art For Vision curated by Sushma Bahl at Gallerie Nvya, October 2004 Sacred Space curated by Anupa Mehta at Jehangir Art Gallery, Mumbai, October 2004 ‘Chivas Art Alive’ curated by Poonam Sarin, New Delhi, December 2004,Mumbai, December 2004 and Bangalore, January 2005 Ardhanareshwara, curated by Dr. Alka Pande at Tao Art Gallery, Mumbai, March 2005 Rattnottama Sen Gupta, Rangroop – The Many Faces of Colour at the Visual Arts Gallery, April 2005 Indian Art Unleashed, Dubai curated by Elizabeth Rogers, September 2005

Group Shows (Abroad)
Galerie Espace Pont-Neuf in Paris
The Wraxall Gallery and the Nehru Centre in London
The Ufundi Gallery in Ottawa
The Viridian Gallery and Bose-Pacia Modern in New York
Atlantic Gallery, Washington D.C.
The East & West Art Gallery, Melbourne
Galeria El Sol, Spain



Awards & Achievements
The Sanskriti award was presented to him in 1981. He was invited to deliver a lecture on his works by the National Gallery of Victoria, Australia. Satish Gupta has given several lectures at various places. Some of the recent ones are The Rotary Club at Amritsar and Sanskriti workshop in New Delhi and a presentation and lecture by ‘Drishti’ at India Habitat Centre, New Delhi, 2007.



Poems & Books
‘I am the dewdrop, I am the ocean’, his book of Zen stories, haikus and reflections was published in 2005. Inspired by Zen, his book of haiku poems “The Broken Wave” was
published in 1985. His poems have been translated in different languages and published in prestigious magazines. In 1986, he published a portfolio of charcoal drawings, ‘Vibrations’, based on hymns from the Rig-Veda.
‘La Lluna Fugissera’, a book of his haiku poems was translated into Catalan and was published by Bromera Poesia in 2001. A book on his works “The Eyes of the Thar” published by Mapin publications was released in Delhi, Mumbai and London in 2000.
In 1990, he designed the stage for a concert by Pandit Ravi Shankar at Siri Fort auditorium, New Delhi, with nine suspended canvases of the moon and clouds.

He calligraphed his poems on large scrolls at the International poetry Festivals in Spain “La costa Poetica” in Altea, 1995 and at “Ardentissima” in Murcia, 1996. In 1997, Satish Gupta exhibited his Zen sculptures at Art Today in New Delhi. He did a limited edition book for an auction for ‘Asiatic Society’, Mumbai, January, 2004.

Films
In 1987, he also acted in a film “Panchvati”, directed by Basu Bhattacharya, based on a story written by Kusum Ansal. The film featured Deepti Naval & Suresh Oberoi.

Sculptures
In 1998, he created a group of five metal sculptures ranging in height from about 10 feet to 33 feet and weighing over 10 tons. They were inspired by the Five Primal Elements and are displayed permanently at the Jindal Centre in New Delhi.

Satish created an installation with a 9 feet high sculpture of Buddha in copper for the show ‘The Sacred Space’ organized by RPG which was displayed at the Jehangir Art Gallery in Mumbai in 2004.

Painting
He has been painting the Thar desert over the last ten years and has travelled extensively in Western Rajasthan and Kutch. He has had several exhibitions of his desert paintings in Delhi, Mumbai, New York, London and Dubai.

Exhibitions
‘Transformation’, a series inspired by his encounters with Zen, was exhibited in Delhi and Mumbai in 2003. These works were based on the physical and spiritual forces, portraying cosmic consciousness.


Other Notable Works of Satish Gupta
Satish Gupta has also participated in art camps at The Oberoi, Mumbai, June 1998, Taj Bengal, Kolkata, Febraury 2001, JW Mariott, Mumbai, September 2004, Harsh Goenka’s art camp at Marvel, Mumbai, January 2005, Turkey and Egypt organised by Popular Prakashan, 2005 and Sitaaray Art Camp, London , 2006, to name a few.

One of Satish’s works was gifted for an auction organized by ‘Give India’ in aid of Tsunami victims curated by Anupa Mehta at Mumbai in the year 2005.He had a show of his paintings and sculptures “A Floating World” at Tamarai Art Space in London recently in October, 2006 and also participated in an auction for WWF. His two works were auctioned at the ‘Khushii Auction’, 2006. He did an installation for ‘Digressing Domains’, a mega show curated by Sushma Bahl for Nitanjali Art Gallery at Lalit Kala Akademi, Rabindra Bhawan, Delhi, 2006. ‘Buddha’s Awakening’, a large suspended installation, composed of 18 works on canvas was displayed in Mumbai, 2006. The event was curated by Anupa Mehta. His recent show Cosmic Matrix II, was exhibited at
Jehangir, Mumbai, January, 2007. The show was sponsored by Gallery Art & Soul. After Bombay it was Cosmic Matrix-III at Birla Art and Culture Academi, Kolkata, in February, 2007.

S.H. Raja

S.H. Raza was born as Syed Haider Raza on February 22, 1922, in the state of Madhya Pradesh.

One of the most distinguished artists of the Indian sub-continent, Raza has been settled in France since 1950. However, his ties with India remain as strong as ever. The paintings of Syed Haider Raza have been done mainly in oil or acrylic and have a very heavy usage of color. His wife is a French artist, Janine Mongillat. Know more about the biography and life history of S.H. Raza with this article:

Raza received his formal training in painting at the Nagpur School of Art (Nagpur) and Sir J. J. School of Art (Mumbai). During his stay at the Sir J.J. School, he became a member of Progressive Artist Group. At that time, S.H. Raza experimented with the Western Modernism, which was moving away from expressionism and towards abstraction. Thereafter, he shifted to France to pursue his studies at the Ecole Nationale des Beaux-Arts of Paris. The paintings of Syed Haider Raza in the 1940s and 1950s revolved mainly around landscapes.

His Style

The paintings of S.H. Raza revolve mainly around nature and its various faucets. His paintings have evolved from being purely expressionist landscapes to abstract ones. He believes the Bindu (dot) to be the center of creation and existence and his works reflect this particular thinking. Even though the vibrancy of his paintings has become subtle, the dynamism remains as alive as ever.
Achievement

A painting by S.H. Raza was reportedly sold for US $1.4 million at an auction held in December 2006. In Feb 2007, his works were exhibited in The Arts Trust - Institute of Contemporary Indian Art (Mumbai).
Recognition
S.H. Raza was awarded the prestigious Padma Shree by the Government of India in the year 1981. He is also a Fellow of the Lalit Kala Akademi of New Delhi. The government of Madhya Pradesh has awarded him the Kalidas Samman.

Tyeb Mehta "India's Pride"

Tyeb Mehta was born in Gujrat in 1925 and spent his earlier years working as a film editor in a cinema laboratory.

His deep interest in arts & painting, however, took him to the Sir J.J. School of Art from where he received his diploma in 1952.

A close friend of the Progressive Artists Group with considerable stylistic affiliation he left for London where he lived and worked between 1959 and 1964. He visited USA on a Rockefeller Fellowship in 1968. His film Koodal, a powerful depiction of the ordinary man's dilemma won the Film fare Critic's Award in 1970.

As an artist residing in Santiniketan between 1984-85, he returned to Mumbai with significant transformation in his work.

Exhibitions

Apart from several solo exhibitions, Mehta has also participated in international shows.

International Platforms

Ten Contemporary Indian Painters at Trenton in the U.S. in 1965 Deuxieme Biennial Internationale de Menton, 1974 Festival Intemationale de la Peinture, Cagnes- -Sur-Mer, France 1974 Modem Indian Paintings at Hirschhom Museum, Washington 1982 Seven Indian Painters at Gallerie Le Monde de U art, Paris 1994.


Mehta's pre-occupation with formalist means of expression have led to matt surfaces, broken with diagonals and imagery which while expressing a deep anguish is specifically painterly. In recent years, there has been a vivid articulation of mythological figures like Kali in a mode mist, symbolic manner. Increasingly, his work uses imagery which is ancient yet powerfully modern.


Records on Tyeb Mehta's Name

Tyeb Mehta holds the record for the highest prices at which Indian paintings have ever been sold which aptly makes him India's pride.

In May 2005, his painting "Kali" sold for 10 million Indian rupees (approximately equal to 230,000 US dollars) at Indian auction house Saffronart's online auction.

A reinterpretation of the tale of "Mahishasura" by Mehta showing Durga locked in an embrace with Mahisha sold for $1.584 million.

In December 2005, Mehta's painting "Gesture" was sold for 31 million Indian rupees to Ranjit Malkani, chairman of Kuomi Travel, at the Osian’s auction. This makes it the highest price paid by an Indian for Indian contemporary art at an auction in India.

Awards Bestowed on Tyeb Mehta

He was awarded the Kalidas Samman by the Madhya Pradesh Government in 1988. He also received Padma Bhushan award in 2007.

Mehta is alive and works in Mumbai, India.

F.N Souza Painter, Writer and Visionary

Indian art has always entangled in itself history, religion and philosophy. India can boast of many a great artiste of the century. Francis Newton Souza was one such artist. He was the first experimental artist from India to achieve wide spread fame in the west.

Birth and Education

He was born on April 12, 1928 in Goa and was Christian by religion.

He studied Art at the J.J. School of Arts in Mumbai but was expelled from the school for his participation in the Quit India Movement way back in 1942.

Souza’a career went steady and he started participating in a lot of exhibitions and shows. Souza was the founder of the Bombay Progressive Artist’s Group. He encouraged all painters to participate in the avant-garde movement. Souza moved to England in the 1950’s.

Souza Paintings

F N Souza’s painting appeared ephemeral with his incensed brushstrokes, criss-cross lines and glossy borders. His paintings seemed grave and futile, pressing and mocking at you. Souza reasserted the intensity of impressions with utmost desperation. Souza’s painting
seemed to attack the canvas. It was as if he waged a war against it. Souza combined the art of ex-pressionism of Rouault and Soutine, fortitude of Cubism and ancient Indian classical sculptures to paint beautiful landscapes, crucifixes, popes and priests etc. Lines were
Souza’s forte. Souza always painted and still left something in his paintings which made them mysterious and captivating.
Souza Writings

What threw Souza into fame was his autobiographical essay ‘Nirvana of a Maggot’ which appeared in 1955 in a magazine edited by Stephen Spender. ‘Words and Lines’ was his other great book which was published in London in 1959. In 1967, Souza settled in New York.

Awards

Soon after independence, he left for Britain, and then for New York, where he received the Guggenheim International Award.
Exhibitions

His works are in the collections of the Tate Gallery, London and the National Gallery of Modern Art, New Delhi. His works were exhibited at the Gallery Creuze, Paris in 1954, at Arts 38, in London, in 1975 and 1976, and at the Bose Pacia Modern, in New York, in 1998.Souza has
also been a part of the Commonwealth Artists of Fame exhibition which was held in London in 1977. He has also participated in several other exhibitions which include one-man shows in Paris in 1954 and 1960 and in Detroit in 1968. In 1987, his retrospectives were held in New Delhi
and Mumbai. He also exhibited his work at the Indus Gallery in Karachi in 1988. In 1996, his paintings were displayed at New Delhi again. In 2005, as part of their British Art Collection, the Tate Britain devoted an area to Souza’s works so that Britain art lovers could
appreciate his work time and now.

Last Days

In his last days, Souza painted many pictures under the title “Goa portfolio” where he added inspiring quotes. Souza was always viewed as a brilliant painter, a good writer, a visionary and a pathfinder. Although Souza lived in the west; first England then New York, he remained a through Indian at heart.

Death
Souza returned to India shortly before his death, Souza was laid to
rest in Sewri cemetery in Mumbai, in a quiet funeral after his death
on March 28, 2002.


Souza was one of the early modernist in the true sense of the term.
Souza’s work had hints of ex-pressionism and British neo-romanticism.
F. N. Souza also received positive appreciation from John Peter
Berger, an art critique. Berger also said that Souza’s style was
deliberately eclectic.

M.F. Hussain "Piccasso of India"

India’s most maverick, modern artist, M F Husain, 94+ years, who single-handedly broke the cordons of exclusivity and took his art mainstream to the masses. From travelling around the world to creating a show of crumpled newspapers, he has mocked critics, courted moneyed buyers yet reached out to people, a bond he built as a hoarding artist painting posters for Bollywood film hoardings.

Some of the most iconic images in Indian art have been his imagination — Mother Teresa, Indira Gandhi, the Lady with the Lamp, vignettes from the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, and of course, his horses.This multi-faceted artist has made significant contributions in other fields also- as a director, photographer and member of the Indian Parliament.

In recent times, it seems to be trendy to dismiss Husain’s prodigious talent, but make no mistake: Husain is India’s tour de force of art.

He has cosmopolitan existence, he has homes in Dubai and London.At home in Dubai, he is creating a series on the Arabic civilisation, and in London, where he has a home, Husain has shielded away from returning to India fearing for his life from Hindu fundamentalists who
have objected to some of his paintings.

His prices have fallen recently, though he has struck the biggest deals for the largest sums of money that any Indian artist has commanded: a whopping Rs 100 crore for one such series in India, and an undisclosed sum for his work on the Arab civilisation, making him without a doubt India’s richest living artist.

In his early years, Maqbool Fida Husain's mother, Zunaib, died when he was an infant and his father, Fida, remarried and moved to Indore, where Husain went to school. He moved to Mumbai at age of 20 when he was admitted to the J. J. School of Arts. He married Fazila in the
year 1941 and they had two daughters Raisa and Aqueela and three sons, Mustafa, a restaurateur and Shamshad and Owais, both painters themselves. During his early days in Mumbai he earned money painting cinema hoarding--- one of the often-told stories about his early days. And except the New Theatre distributor, the others did not pay us at
all. As soon as he earned a little bit he used to take off for Surat, Baroda and Ahmedabad to paint landscapes.

Given this bad pay, Husain tried other jobs as well. One of the best paying was a toy factory, where he designed and built fretwork toys.

His career has now spanned several decades and here below we are taking an insight into his significant works in time span between 1940-1965, particularly and then later. The time when he reached out to masses and won a place in their hearts.

Hussain's popularity grew as an artist in the late 1940s. In 1947, he joined the Progressive Artists' Group, founded by Francis Newton Souza. This was a clique of young artists who wished to break with the nationalist traditions established by the Bengal school of art and to encourage an Indian avant-garde, engaged at an international level. In 1952, his first solo exhibition was held at Zürich and over the next few years, his work was widely seen in Europe and U.S..

In 1955, he was awarded the prestigious Padma Shree prize by the Government of India.

In the 1947 annual exhibition of the Bombay Art Society, his painting Sunhera Sansaar was shown. This was his first exhibition. After the Partition later that year, Husain decided to stay in India. Soon the Progressive Artists' Group was formed. Through it, Husain was exposed to, and strongly influenced by, the work of Emil Nolde and Oskar Kokoschka. From 1948 to 1950 a series of exhibitions all over India brought Husain's work to the notice of the public.

His work was exhibited at the Salon de Mai in Paris (1951), the Venice biennales (1953, 1955), Tokyo Biennale (1959 where he won the International Biennale Award), the São Paulo biennales in1959 and in 1971 where he was invited to exhibit alongside Pablo Picasso. His work was first shown in the USA at India House, New York, in 1964.

Besides painting, he has also made a film 'Through the Eyes of a Painter' in 1967 which went on to win the Golden Bear Award in Berlin Film Festival. He has made several short films since then.He has been awarded the Padma Bhushan in 1973 and the Padma Vibhushan in 1991.

A big mural of his, around 40 feet high called the Portrait of the 20th Century depicts all the major personalities of arts, science, dance, literature, politics etc.

Husain's most interesting paintings of the 90's is the series named after Madhuri Dixit, a well known cine artist in Hindi cinema. He saw her film 'Hum Aapke Hai Kaun.' 67 times and painted a whole series of paintings on her, and even directed her in a film 'Gaja Gamini'. Hussain became the talk of the town for his open fascination with Madhuri Dixit. Subsequently, he made another film 'Meenaxi: A Tale of Three Cities' with Tabu, another cine artist.

Described by Forbes magazine as 'the Picasso of India', Hussain, the immensely popular and controversial artist, remains a central figure in the contemporary Indian art scene.

Exhibition of Kandinsky Work in Paris

An exhibition displaying more than 90 works of the Russian painter, Kandinsky is running from April 8,2009 at the Georges Pompidou Center and will run until August 10 before heading to New York, where the exhibition will be hosted by the Solomon R. Guggenheim museum this
fall.

The exhibition is jointly organized by the Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus in Munich, the Georges Pompidou Center in Paris and the Guggenheim in New York, features the works of the artist in chronological order, divided into the five major periods of his artistic career, which were marked by the three countries he resided in: Russia, Germany and France.

Starting with pieces from his years as a student in Munich and his travels through Europe (1896-1907), the exhibition debuts with paintings of folklore and legends from his country of birth, Russia. Whether painted in Munich or Paris, these first works show the
influence from his natal city Moscow. At this stage his paintings deal with concrete subjects, such as Russian Scene, painted in 1903.

The second period, Munich (1908 to 1914), marks a turning point in the artist’s work, where he moves away from limited forms and towards abstract art. The use of strong colors becomes more prevalent.

During this period even the titles of his paintings changed, from detailed descriptions such as, Landscape near Murnau with Locomotive, 1909, to the use of terms like “improvisations.” The improvisations, apart from being a reference to music and it’s relation with color,
are what the artist described as “visual translations of strong spiritual moments.”

In 1914, after the declaration of the War, Kandinsky was forced to return to Russia where he spent six years. Leaving Germany, following the breakup of his relationship with Gabrielle Münter, led Kandinsky to a somber unproductive period. The few pieces produced during this time show a return to the naivety that characterized the first years of his career. Paintings such as, Moscow, 1916, show tangible forms and concrete subjects; Moscow again became his principle subject.

Regrettably, the first three compositions were destroyed during World War II. The highlight of the exhibition (and probably of Kandinsky’s career) is the fourth room or fourth period of works dating from the time the artist left the Soviet Union and settled in Germany in 1921.
This was a time of intense creativity, painting, teaching and writing, which gave birth to some of the most representative art of Kandinsky, including Composition VIII and Several circles.

Kandinsky had always expressed a strong dislike for the color black and it is significant that he chose it as the dominating color of his last major artistic statement.Because of Nazi persecution, Kandinsky left Germany in 1933, and settled in Neuilly Sur Seine, in France,
where he died in 1944 as a French citizen.