Résumé : La 4e de couverture indique : "Formed just months after the 1947 Partition of India and during tremendous violence and protest, the Progressive Artists Group (PAG) included artists seeking a break with their country's past and its cultural constraints. For nearly a decade these painters and sculptors explored ideas about art for a new nation. Through lush illustrations and scholarly essays, this volume looks at the brand of modernism the group espoused and its relevance and importance to contemporary art. The careers of artists K.H. Ara, S.K. Bakre, H.A. Gade, V.S. Gaitonde, M.F. Husain, Krishen Khanna, Ram Kumar, Tyeb Mehta, Akbar Padamsee, S.H. Raza, Mohan Samant, and F.N. Souza are presented in three sections. 'The Realists' explores how artists turned away from the trauma of Mumbai and toward folk and rural culture. 'India International' demonstrates how the Progressives mined contemporary artists such as Mark Rothko, Paul Klee, and Pablo Picasso to create their own distinct genre. 'Masters of the Game' brings together works created after the PAG's dissolution and shows how these pieces collectively gave visual form to the idea of India as secular, heterogeneous, international, and united. A valuable examination of the ways artistic expression can preserve and advance its cultural heritage, this volume captures an exciting time in India's art history"

Résumé : After an early stint in Bombay, where he was a founding member of the Progressive Artists’ Group, he moved to France, where he spent the next sixty years. This volume explores Raza’s artistic trajectory from the time of his arrival in Paris, as well as his contribution to the development of modernism in the Indian subcontinent. Beginning with early works developed in India before 1947, the essays in this volume analyze Raza’s later abstraction processes and landscapes. His strong thrust towards non-figurative art, and subsequent influences from European and American modernism, combined with Raza’s own memories and impressions of India and led him to a skilful negotiation between Indian spirituality and Western abstraction. Raza’s bold, failed experiment with the French Cubist style is also explored here, leading to the crucial moment when he decided he had to unlearn everything he knew. In addition to the essays, an anthology of previously unpublished letters offer glimpses of the master at work, and a detailed chrono-biography situates him within the transcultural dynamics of the 1950s to the 1980s. Accompanying the S.H. Raza exhibition at the Centre Pompidou in Paris in 2023, this catalogue presents a compelling overview of Raza’s work and the highlights of his journey.