Important Notice

“To me, the images in the Head series represent suffering. I want to make others suffer, to make myself suffer. I have no desire to redeem myself or anybody else because Man is by his very nature unredeemable, yet he hankers so desperately after redemption. I wanted to hang myself on the cross with both my hands and feet nailed to it. To have arrows quivering in my neck like flies, while in the sweetness of lovemaking…to repose in ... “To me, the images in the Head series represent suffering. I want to make others suffer, to make myself suffer. I have no desire to redeem myself or anybody else because Man is by his very nature unredeemable, yet he hankers so desperately after redemption. I wanted to hang myself on the cross with both my hands and feet nailed to it. To have arrows quivering in my neck like flies, while in the sweetness of lovemaking…to repose in absolute bliss, the bliss of Ananda. That is what I have portrayed in these images.” - F N SOUZA

F N Souza's 'Heads' from the 1950s are probably his most important and well-known figurative works. These portraits reflect his deep interest in the human condition and set the precedent for a unique style - one that peeled away the appearance and revealed instead his subjects' character, personality, and even their obsessions and depravations. "Many of the tendencies that became distinct in Souza's later years could be detected in these early works. The thick, bounding line, the distortion of the figure and the dislocation of facial characteristics had already begun to mark his style." (Yashodhara Dalmia, The Making of Modern Indian Art: The Progressives, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2001, p. 80)

Souza's heads and human forms first appeared in the late 1940s, undergoing gradual transformations in style over time - from the cross-hatching technique that became the hallmark of his early works, to loops, whorls and squiggles delineating the distorted visages of his subjects. He remained compelled by the immediacy and impactfulness of figurative art throughout his career. In a 1986 interview the artist stated, "The advantage a figurative painter has over the abstract artist is sheer impact: the brute force of an expressionist painting of a large, distorted, suggestive naked lady can overwhelm the bravest abstract painting - no doubt about it - because humans will be humans... The other most important advantage figurative art has over non-figurative art is that humans can transmit energy to humans through images whereas abstract symbols like the swastika, for example, must be charged with a lot of meaning by tradition before it can be taken to be potent." (Artist quoted in Dalmia, p. 77)

The post-war climate of London, where Souza was living and working at the time of painting the present lot, saw artists like Francis Bacon using their art to reflect upon the brutal reality of a society that was still reverberating from the war. Souza, who was often likened to Bacon by critics and was himself reeling from the political atmosphere of a newly independent India, experienced a similar disillusionment in London when he painted Broken Head in 1957. Souza's subjects during this time were the savagely distorted heads of the everyman, with soulless eyes displaced to the forehead, a set of gnashing teeth bared, and the face "a ridged, rocky terrain bounded by lines and petrified by its own violence." (Dalmia, p. 83)

And yet, Souza managed to stand out, in spite of having Bacon as his contemporary - an artist considered to be "England's one really significant post-War painter." Souza's work shone in that "pale, polite, fog-filled environment", and helped him establish his reputation as an artist who was part of a "new English tradition of the grotesque." (Geeta Kapur, "Devil in the Flesh," Contemporary Indian Artists, New Delhi: Vikas Publishing House Pvt. Ltd., 1978, pp. 12-13)

Painted in 1957, the present lot comes from an important period in Souza's career - one where he finally found the recognition and critical acclaim he'd been seeking since his arrival in London in 1949. In fact, Souza's initial years in England were rather bleak and filled with hardship and he quickly realised this was not the promised land he had imagined. "Whatever promises were there were 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." (Artist quoted in F N Souza, New York: Saffronart and Grosvenor Gallery, 2008, p. 8)

As Souza struggled with the deprivation that was brought on by poverty, he also found it difficult to break into London's famed art circles. In fact, "by 1954, livelihood prospects looked so bad that he wondered whether he should return to India which, being a poor man's land, might be more hospitable to an impoverished artist." (Kapur, p. 11)

His luck, however, suddenly took a turn in 1954. This was when he met poet, critic and editor of the literary magazine Encounter, Stephen Spender, exhibited his works in a solo exhibition at the Galerie Raymond Creuze in Paris and at the Venice Biennale, and also caught the eye of Victor Musgrave, the owner of a tiny gallery in Litchfield Street, the original Gallery One.

The following year saw Souza having his first solo exhibition at Gallery One, which coincided with the publication of his famous autobiographical essay "Nirvana of a Maggot" in Encounter. The combination of the two brought Souza instant recognition, more or less overnight, according to Mullins. John Berger, critic for The New Statesman and Nation, in a review of Souza's Gallery One exhibition, stated, "How much Souza's pictures derive from western art and how much from the hieratic temple tradition of his country, I cannot say. Analysis breaks down and intuition takes over. It is obvious that he is a superb designer and an excellent draughtsman. But I find it quite impossible to assess his work comparatively. Because he straddles several traditions but serves none." (John Berger, "An Indian Painter," The New Statesman and Nation, 26 February 1955, online)

What followed was a period of great artistic success for Souza. "For almost ten years, from 1956 to 1966, he dominated the British art scene, showing his work and selling regularly. He was written about extensively and received praise from critics such as John Berger, Edwin Mullins and David Sylvester, to name a few." (Rasheed Araeen ed., The Other Story: Afro- Asian Artists in Post-War Britain, London: South Bank Centre, 1989, p. 23) His works from this time in London were a mix of religious still-life compositions, striking female nudes, carefully structured landscapes, and bold figurations.

The present lot, a large, disfigured head, is a rare and important example of this format that Souza returned to repeatedly in his work. Drawing variously from traditional African art, mediaeval iconography, and Renaissance portraits, the artist would portray a single, unique head and torso against a relatively plain background to emphasise his views of powerful and orthodox individuals and society. As Geeta Kapur observes, "Around 1955 he fashioned for his purpose a distinctive type of head for which he is perhaps best known. It is a face without a forehead, bearded and pockmarked, eyes bulging from the side of the skull...a mouth full of multiple sets of teeth." These works also saw the use of the arrow as a recurring device. "Sometimes the arrows are as small as needles, sometimes as long as lances and Souza uses them for the purpose of a kind of voodoo, destroying the enemy by piercing his stuffed effigy. Indeed the way he rigs up his image with his brushwork, the way he mauls it, stamps it, suggests that he quite believes in the magical efficacy of images. Andrew Forge, writing on Souza's work, once said, "You can see him closing in on his images as though they could save his life or backing away from them as though they could kill him."" (Kapur, pp. 27-28)

Figurations from the 1950s, such as the present lot, served as channels for the artist's scathing social commentary, frequently centred on the dual issues of sex and religion, pleasure and suffering, which absorbed him all through his career. He belonged "to the important category of artists who have helped to demolish whatever vestiges of conceit that were attached to the human image in the present age." (Kapur, p. 28) Offering insight into his personal life as well as his beliefs, they unmasked the hypocrisy he saw in both the clergy and the gentry, exposing their 'soullessness' for all to see. As he once famously stated, "Renaissance painters painted men and women making them look like angels...I paint for angels, to show them what men and women really look like." (Artist quoted in Edwin Mullins, Souza, London: Anthony Blond Ltd., 1962, p. 82)

According to Edwin Mullins, "...because his images are clearly intended to be human, one is compelled to ask why his faces have eyes high up in the forehead, or else scattered in profusion all over the face; why he paints mouths that stretch like hair combs across the face, and limbs that branch out like thistles. Souza's imagery is not a surrealist vision - a self-conscious aesthetic shock - so much as a spontaneous re-creation of the world as he has seen it, distilled in the mind by a host of private experiences and associations." (Mullins, p. 39)

In Broken Head, Souza fractures his subject's elongated visage along several axes, giving it a three-dimensional, sculptural quality reminiscent of the African masks that inspired the Cubist works of Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque. Along with its high-set, rectangular eyes and its lightning-bolt nose, this head has been pierced by several thick black arrows, alluding to the hypocrisy and false piety of the members of clergy and elite society that it represents. "It is in depicting heads that Souza introduced his most inventive features that bring to the fore his whole painterly arsenal... It is the line that is Souza's most articulate element and he uses it with great agility to encase the form. It is a sharp, clear, virile boundary that separates negative space from positive space and by its sheer virtuosity delineates the object." (Dalmia, p. 93)

At the core of Souza's figuration lay a desire to portray humanity for what it really was. As Mullins notes, "Souza's particular strength lies not in his refusal to admit the importance of abstract art, but in his capacity to find in figurative painting everything that he needs; so much so, that he cannot understand why any other artist can do anything else. 'To paint abstract paintings is quite impossible.' Souza has written, 'it's like trying to paint thin air and those who think they do are fooling themselves. They claim to be going "beyond". Beyond what? Beyond zero is minus. They say the spectator must bring his own imagination to work upon their painted surfaces, which means that the spectator should do all the work. It's another instance of the Emperor's clothes. And if this is "art", then I'm the little boy who shouts 'it's naked!'" (Mullins, p. 36)

HAROLD KOVNER

In 1956, Souza found his first major patron, the wealthy American collector and hospital owner Harold Kovner, through a gallery in Paris. Having arrived from New York looking for new artists, Kovner went to Gallery Iris Clert, but was unimpressed by their collection of abstracts. The eponymous gallery owner possessed several paintings by Souza and showed some of these works to Kovner with some reluctance. "Kovner jumped. Within 24 hours he had met Souza, given him money, taken away some pictures, made arrangements for the future, and was flying back to New York. The arrangement was a perfectly simple one. Souza was to keep him supplied with pictures every few months - entirely of the artist's choosing - and in return Kovner would keep him supplied with money." (Mullins, p. 26)

The duration of this patronage, which lasted four years, was creatively and artistically, the most energising period of Souza's career. Souza painted two portraits of Kovner - in 1958 and 1971 (see reference images) - underlining the significance that their relationship held for the artist. Kovner's regular stipend relieved Souza of financial troubles, allowing him more freedom to paint than ever before. Kovner's support during this critical period was a time of unprecedented inventiveness for the artist. Over this period, Kovner collected about two hundred of Souza's works, making his collection one of the largest and most important ones of the artist's paintings. The present lot was part of this collection.

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