One of India’s most successful contemporary artists, Sayed Haider Raza, died yesterday in New Delhi. He was 94.
An internationally acclaimed artist who spent a large part of his life in Paris, Raza’s most famous works were abstracts in dazzling colours around the bindu - dot in Hindi.
Raza was suffering from ailments related to old age and had been in an intensive care unit of a New Delhi hospital for two months before he passed away yesterday, friend and poet Ashok Vajpeyi said.
Raza’s works were mainly in oil or acrylic.
He painted landscapes early in his career but soon moved to abstracts with geometric motifs like circles and triangles in deep, bright colours, often drawing inspiration from Indian philosophy.
Raza began painting at the age of 12 and had said most of his early themes were inspired by childhood memories of forests around his native village of Babaria in Mandla district of Madhya Pradesh.
His funeral rites would be carried out today at Mandla according to his wishes, Vajpeyi said.
Raza, who returned to India in 2010 after spending six decades in France, mostly in Paris and in Gorbio in southern France, has been awarded various honours by the Indian and French governments.
He was one of India’s most expensive artists with his larger canvases fetching anything between $2mn to $3mn.
Raza was a pioneer of modern Indian art and was one of the founders of the Progressive Artists Group in 1948 along with other young artists of the time like F N Souza.