S H Raza

Sayed Haider Raza was born in 1922 in Kakkaiya, in Mandla district. He studied at the Nagpur School of Art and then at the Sir J J School of Art in Bombay, and had his first solo show at the Bombay Art Society Salon in 1946.

In 1947 he founded the Bombay Progressive Artists’ Group with F N Souza and K H Ara. In 1950 he left for Paris and the École des Beaux-Arts. He stayed for six decades. In 1956 he won the Prix de la Critique, the first painter from outside France to receive it. He married the French painter Janine Mongillat in 1959.

The early French pictures are landscapes and village churches in thick impasto. Later he turned toward Indian scripture and Tantric forms. By 1980 the bindu had arrived: a dark point at the centre of the canvas, which he took as the seed of creation. He painted versions of it for more than thirty years.

His wife died in 2002. Around 2010 he moved back to Delhi, kept painting for several hours a day, and died there in 2016, aged 94. He asked to be buried in Mandla beside his father. The Raza Foundation, which he set up, gives an annual award to young artists. A separate foundation in Gorbio, France, looks after the French side of his estate.