Painted in 1970, Blue Novembre was realized at a time when Sayed Haider Raza was moving away from Post-Impressionist influences and representational landscapes towards a more expressionistic and abstract idiom. This transition in his oeuvre followed a 1962 visit to North America by the artist, as a visiting lecturer at the University of California, Berkeley, and subsequently a Rockefeller Foundation Fellow.

Inspired by the freedom and visual impact of the work of American Abstract Expressionists such as Mark Rothko, Sam Francis and Jackson Pollock, Raza began to paint with a fluidity that had not been seen before. This was also the juncture at which Raza began to use quick-drying acrylic paints rather than oil as a medium. This allowed the artist more gestural freedom in his brushwork and new possibilities to mine the expressive potential of his colors and bestow his works with deep emotional power. Once he was back in Paris, working in a new studio on Avenue Secretan, Raza was, as Ashok Vajpeyi notes, “on his way to be more free, more resident in his artistic vision.” This transitional period in the artist’s career marked a critical moment, where Raza questioned his practice and artistic influences to paint some of his most refined works. Vajpeyi called these paintings “emotional essays in colour”, noting that reflected in them “There was passionate fury and restless reaching out to catch the essence of experience.” (A. Vajpeyi, A Life in Art: Raza, New Delhi, 2007, p. 78)

The two distinct parts of Blue Novembre reveal the tumult that the artist’s mind and palette was undergoing at the time. The composition is structured with two upper horizontal lines of white and deep blue, suspended above a panel of dark and primary colors that freely intermingle. The tempestuous touches of color provide an incandescent contrast to the darkness they emerge from, endowing the painting with a depth that draws and holds viewers in its dominion. Flashes of vermillion, yellow, blue and ochre flicker across the surface, as if dancing through the undergrowth in the twilight. These lyrical and brilliant brushstrokes are contained by the horizontal lines at the top of the composition, hinting at the structural abstraction towards which Raza’s painting would soon progress.

The 1970s were a decisive decade during which Raza painted some of his most impressive masterpieces. It was also in this period of gestural expression, sometimes termed ‘lyrical abstraction’, that the artist mastered his use of color in its full emotional and sensual breath. “More importantly, he continued to explore further possibilities of colour, making colour rather than any geometrical design or division the pivotal element around which his paintings moved. Also, colours were not being used as merely formal elements: they were emotionally charged. Their movements or consonances on the canvases seemed more and more to be provoked by emotions, reflecting or embodying emotive content. The earlier objectivity, or perhaps the distance started getting replaced or at least modified by an emergent subjectivity – colours started to carry the light load of emotions more than ever before.” (A. Vajpeyi, Ibid., p. 78)

Blue Novembre is an early example of the artist’s intention to use color to create landscapes that were less about tangible representation and more about the mood they evoked in him. In the present painting, Raza delivers to viewers a lyrical journey into a misty, tumultuous autumn night.