Important Notice

Lot 88

This work comes at a significant period in the life of Souza – at a time when Souza as an Indian artist, was striving to make a name for himself critically and commercially in London. This piece was painted in 1956, a year after the artist finally broke into the London art scene when Victor Musgrave hosted his first solo exhibition at Gallery One, then a small space he ran on Litchfield Street. In addition, Souza’s autobiographical essay about... This work comes at a significant period in the life of Souza – at a time when Souza as an Indian artist, was striving to make a name for himself critically and commercially in London. This piece was painted in 1956, a year after the artist finally broke into the London art scene when Victor Musgrave hosted his first solo exhibition at Gallery One, then a small space he ran on Litchfield Street. In addition, Souza’s autobiographical essay about Goa, Nirvana of a Maggot, had just been published in the journal ‘Encounter’, edited by acclaimed poet Stephen Spender and he was making waves in the literary world as well.

This particular piece is also significant in terms of its style. Though Souza employed his characteristic heavy impasto and the aggressive black lines that were inspired by the works of Rouault, Sutherland and Soutine in its creation, this work is particularly significant in its lack of violence and disfiguration of the central character. Combining his iconic townscapes with his equally infamous heads in this work, it seems at first that Souza has forsaken the eroticism, satire and religious commentary that were his trademarks at the time, for a simple man about town, dressed in a suit and tie.

However, on closer inspection, it seems the artist is indeed making a comment in this work, though implicitly rather than through coarse satire. This piece captures the circumscribed life of a town dweller, who, wearing a defeated expression, seems subsumed by the dreariness and drudgery of everyday life over which he can exercise no control. Souza evokes a number of emotions through this man – compassion and anger to name a few – as well as introspection about the viewer’s own life, which suddenly allude to shocking similarities.

According to Edwin Mullins, who published the first monograph on Souza in 1962, his portraits like this one are “full of apparent contradictions: agony wit, pathos and satire, aggression and pity. Their impact is certain but few people are able to explain what has hit them.” (Edwin Mullins, Souza, 1962, p.39).

Alternatively, this piece, titled The Student, may be read as a satirical comment on formal systems of education, with which Souza never had a good experience. He was expelled first from his Jesuit high school in Bombay, thwarting his plans to become a Catholic priest, and then, five years later, from the Sir J. J. School of Art in the same city, cutting short his academic training as a painter. Formal education to Souza, then, was a constraint rather than an instrument of realizing ones aspirations, and, in that light, this work is perhaps a comment on the ‘system’, and its power to summarily mute passions and pigeon-hole lives.

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