A spokesperson for the NGMA Delhi also declined to comment on the matter. Vajpeyi declines to comment as to why he thinks the NGMA did not accept. According to Vajpeyi, the exhibition was also offered to the National Gallery of Modern Art in Delhi, India's most prominent state-run museum of 19th- and 20th-century art, but the institution did not accept the proposal. Staging this show is a major coup for the Raza Foundation, which had worked for more than five years to pitch and organise it. The overall result is, he adds, an "alternative modernism-not one of rupture and tensions, but of peace and harmony, which is quite unlike that of his peers in both France and India." But "he remained, above all, a painter of inner nature" and "a master colourist in a way that very few have done in India, at least", Vajpeyi says. Speaking of the stylistic evolution charted by the show, he says that Raza was picked up by a Parisian gallerist in the mid 1950s and quickly began using oil paints and a palette knife, mimicking techniques of European Post-Impressionist masters such as Cézanne. ![]() "Raza often told me, 'How I paint I learned from France, but what I paint I get from India,'" says Ashok Vajpeyi, the executive trustee of the Raza Foundation, which was established by the artist in 2001. His subjects ranged from country landscapes and churches to Indian temple congregations, Islamic architecture and Western cityscapes eventually he moved into his more abstract-and arguably better-known-period, which dates from the late 1960s onwards and incorporates elements of Tantrism from South Asian scriptures. The Pompidou show spans the artist's entire career, from his beginnings in 1940s Mumbai (then called Bombay), where he was one of the founding members of the hugely influential Bombay Progressives Artists' Group, to his move to France in 1950, where he would be based on-and-off for the remainder of his life, and where he developed a style that mixed post-war French and American painting with Rajasthani miniature traditions. ![]() SH Raza (1922-2016) (until 15 May) is the first major monographic show of the artist, as well as the first to take place in a state-run institution, and brings together more than 90 works in the capital city of his second home. One of India's best-known Modernist painters, the late SH Raza, receives his largest-ever retrospective at the Centre Pompidou in Paris.
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