Important Notice

"It is in depicting heads that Souza introduced his most inventive features that bring to the fore his whole painterly arsenal. His use of colour is conventional with thick, rigid strokes of paint squeezed straight from the tube on to the canvas. Th eir burnished quality is reminiscent of the old masters, its expressive content not fully exploited and not in cohesion with the radical quality of the subject." (Yashodhara Dalmia, "A Passion for... "It is in depicting heads that Souza introduced his most inventive features that bring to the fore his whole painterly arsenal. His use of colour is conventional with thick, rigid strokes of paint squeezed straight from the tube on to the canvas. Th eir burnished quality is reminiscent of the old masters, its expressive content not fully exploited and not in cohesion with the radical quality of the subject." (Yashodhara Dalmia, "A Passion for the Human Figure," The Making of Modern Indian Art, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2001, p. 93)

Souza's heads and human forms first appeared in the late 1940s, undergoing gradual transformations over time. The rigid heads became tubular and dismembered in appearance. In the 1970s, during his time in New York, Souza still showed a strong preference for the thick black line which framed the contours of many of his earlier heads, but he also experimented with heavy, colourful impasto work, as seen in the present lot. He also painted a series of landscapes during this time, characterised by energetic gestural movements, dribbling and splotching, which critic Aziz Kurtha likens to "action painting" in Francis Newton Souza: Bridging Western and Indian Modern Art. While this assumed a structural appearance in his landscapes, it produced a freer form of expression in his figurations, as seen in the present lot.

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