Important Notice

“My drawings and paintings, for instance, are made of a little structure: two parallel lines cross-hatched on either side e.g. all my work-still-lifes, landscapes, portraits and compositions-are based on this principle.” - F N SOUZA

While his fellow members and associates of the Progressive Artists’ Group, such as S H Raza and Akbar Padamsee, began moving from figuration to abstraction by the late 1950s, F N Souza resolutely remained a... “My drawings and paintings, for instance, are made of a little structure: two parallel lines cross-hatched on either side e.g. all my work-still-lifes, landscapes, portraits and compositions-are based on this principle.” - F N SOUZA

While his fellow members and associates of the Progressive Artists’ Group, such as S H Raza and Akbar Padamsee, began moving from figuration to abstraction by the late 1950s, F N Souza resolutely remained a figurative artist throughout his life. He drew incessantly and, in the process, came up with his own pictorial idiom that expressed his preoccupation with enduring themes such as the hypocrisy of man, religion and suffering, and eroticism and the female form.

Rather than employing realism Souza displayed an affinity for the grotesque. His subjects are often distorted, with soulless eyes displaced to the forehead, bared teeth, and the face “a ridged, rocky terrain bounded by lines and petrified by its own violence”, as seen in lot 18. (Yashodhara Dalmia, “A Passion for the Human Figure,” The Making of Modern Indian Art: The Progressives, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2001, p. 83)

The artist’s drawings of the 1950s and 1960s “reveal his successive attempts to present what was dearest to him, the human form. We can feel the artist’s delight in letting the line walk freely and loosely in his drawings.” (Aziz Kurtha, “Idiom and Expression,” Francis Newton Souza, Ahmedabad: Mapin Publishing, 2006, p. 100) A master draughtsman, he drew with a spontaneity that gave his works a sense of raw immediacy as observed in lot 19, which is part of a series of preparatory sketches that culminated in his 1963 painting, Beasts of Prey. In this work, the rigid lines often seen in his ‘Heads’ give way to loops and coils and reduce the figures to writhing, tormented beings.

Souza’s Catholic upbringing in Goa left a lasting impression on him, and images of Christ, saints, and the clergy began appearing in his works from the early 1950s onwards. He rebelled against the authoritarian structure of the Church and depicted religious figures with irreverence. In lot 18, a drawing from 1952, Christ is turned into a caricature devoid of compassion or redeeming features, unlike the deified representations seen in much of Western art. “Suffering is ignoble, he proposes in his images, and there is no trace of sublimity in the face of those whom he shows to be suffering.” (Geeta Kapur, “Francis Newton Souza,” Contemporary Indian Artists, New Delhi: Vikas Publishing House Pvt Ltd, 1978, p. 17) The work also displays the use of parallel cross-hatched lines, a technique the artist frequently used to add a sense of menace to his subjects. “The etiological basis of Souza’s demonic faces consists of two parallel lines cross-hatched on either side like harpooning spears. By dexterously manipulating this he is able to circumvent shading. Instead, he achieves an extraordinarily mobile visage with flickering nerves, gnashing teeth, and flashing eyes.” (Dalmia, p. 83).

Souza’s works often swing between contradictory tendencies. They are both sacred and profane, anguished and humorous. The artist’s defiance of the Catholic church is also reflected in his preoccupation with eroticism and the female nude. As with his religious works, his drawings of entwined lovers lack any romance or sentimentality. The figures in Lot 20, for instance, “...never participate in an act of mutual pleasure but seem to be engaged in a duel where each wants to assert his or her own will.” (Dalmia, p. 91)

The existentialism artists and writers felt in post-War London of the 1950s, as well as Souza’s own personal struggles with poverty when he first moved to the city in 1949, bolstered his often cynical temperament. Consequently, his landscapes too acquired an ominous aura as seen in lot 17, executed in 1958. Here, demarcated with cross- hatched lines and spiky forms, barren trees grow in different directions in the foreground, behind which dilapidated buildings are stacked against each other on a heightened plane. There is thus simultaneously a sense of movement and foreboding.

As art historian Geeta Kapur observes, “Of the pictorial elements it is decidedly the line which is the most developed part of Souza’s vocabulary... One has only to compare Souza to his contemporary figurative Expressionists to realize how much freer he is in the simultaneous manipulation of mind and hand, and how much more tough and incisive.” (Kapur, p. 34)

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