Important Notice

Lot 84

Through the mid-1950s, approximately 5 years after Souza’s departure from India, his art and writings began gaining widespread critical acclaim in London. The fifties and sixties were important years, aesthetically, for Souza in terms of the art that he created, but were also his most successful, commercially. In February 1955, Victor Musgrave held Souza’s first solo exhibition at his gallery - Gallery One, a small premises located on Litchfield... Through the mid-1950s, approximately 5 years after Souza’s departure from India, his art and writings began gaining widespread critical acclaim in London. The fifties and sixties were important years, aesthetically, for Souza in terms of the art that he created, but were also his most successful, commercially. In February 1955, Victor Musgrave held Souza’s first solo exhibition at his gallery - Gallery One, a small premises located on Litchfield Street in London. Soon, Souza came to be celebrated not just as an artist of outstanding ability by critics such as David Sylvester, John Berger, and Edwin Mullins, but also as a writer: Souza’s autobiographical essay Nirvana of a Maggot, published in 1954 in Encounter magazine, made waves in literary circles.

This work is characteristic of Souza’s work in the early 1960’s as his heavier impasto technique shifted to a flatter application of colour, but retained the characteristic bold black strokes, inspired by Georges Rouault or Chaim Soutine. This painting is particularly important in this context, as it is illustrated on the cover of the definitive publication on Souza’s work at the time, by Edwin Mullins. In 1962, this painting was exhibited at the launch of Mullin’s book titled Souza, at Gallery One’s new premises at North Audley Street in London .

Although Souza’s presence faded from the Modern British art scene when he shifted to New York, he has again been recognized by private and public institutions, both, prior to his demise and posthumously. In 1993, the Tate Britain bought his 1959 painting titled, Crucifixion and the institution has recently showed his work and allocated a section of their gallery to him, identifying him as an artist who is an integral part of Modern British art history.

The origins of Souza’s aesthetic identity has been a much contested point. For some his aesthetic definition is tied to his involvement with The Progressive Artists Group, founded in tandem with Indian national independence. For Yashodhra Dalmia for instance, Souza plays a part in the definition of a national Indian art: “His first solo show at the Bombay Art Society in December 1945…were to direct the course of Souza’s work in the following years…Souza’s daring and powerful expression at a time when academic realism still held sway over the public mind made quite an impact, but it also drewa a good deal of disapproval. In fact, it was largely to forge a front against conventional art that Souza first thought of forming the Progressive Artists Group in 1947…Souza’s 1945 exhibition and the ones that were to follow were not only innovative, they also rescued the art situation from its cultural morass.” (Yashodhara Dalmia, The Making of Modern Indian Art, The Progressives, Oxford University Press, 2001, p.78)

For Mullins, Souza was an artist per se, to be looked at not as an other, but as someone following in the footsteps of a European tradition: “ Souza is a painter with a powerful and strange personal vision…He is an image maker and not an aesthete or a theorist. These are earth paintings, and their impact lies in the artist’s power to distort and strengthen the eye’s image of this world, and to produce and effect almost shocking in its intensity. His forebears are Grunewald, El Greco, Rembrandt, Rubens, Daumier, Rouault and Picasso – painters whose imaginations conceived new patterns of reality oout of images which their eyes have witnessed.” (Edwin Mullins, Souza, Anthony Blond Ltd, 1962, p. 33)

This image though seems to circumvent both definitions, neither European or Indian it is less about place and more about an inner state of being, Souza’s landscape is a no-man’s land of burning oranges and violent-looking black lines. The artist said of his writing, what could be said of his painting: “I’d want my language to ooze out of my mouth naturally….Such a language may have no orthography, no solecisms….it comes from the heart.” (Souza, Words and Lines, 1959, Villiers Publications Ltd., p. 13)

Read More
Artist Profile
Other works of this artist in: this auction  |  entire site