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Lot 42

 

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“Souza is a painter with a powerful and strange personal vision. His paintings are neither primitive nor ‘cultured’. They either move you by their stark interpretation of the visual world, or they repel you...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 an effect almost shocking in its... “Souza is a painter with a powerful and strange personal vision. His paintings are neither primitive nor ‘cultured’. They either move you by their stark interpretation of the visual world, or they repel you...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 an effect almost shocking in its intensity” (Edwin Mullins, Souza, Anthony Blond Ltd., London, 1962, p. 33).

For F.N. Souza, the years between 1949, when he boarded a ship to London, and 1955, when he finally made a name for himself in the city’s art and literary communities, were bleak. Poor and hungry in the shattered Post-War city, the artist realized England was not the Promised Land he had imagined. “Whatever promises were there in the museums. But the people, and the grimness of London, were quite horrifying. One immediately thought, ‘What?’ These people used to rule India, you know? It was unbelievable. When I went to London, England still had rationing. It was post-war – they were still smarting from the aftermath of the war. There was rationing of utilities, curtailment in all fields, but the one thing that really was quite remarkable, as far as my destiny, is that I continued painting through thick and thin” (as quoted in F.N. Souza, Saffronart and Grosvenor Gallery exhibition catalogue, New York, 2008, p. 8).

Souza’s work from the period, particularly his austere landscapes like the present lot, reflect the angst he felt during his first five years in London. Desolate and uninviting, these landscapes are populated not by people, but instead by dark, scattered houses and menacing, spiny trees, each framed by the artist’s aggressive black line.

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