Important Notice

“Souza is an image-maker… His art lies in his power to strengthen the eye’s image of this world by distorting it, until it becomes merely the language by which his own mental images are expressed, and the common ground on which we may come to terms with them.” - EDWIN MULLINS (F N Souza, New Delhi: Kumar Gallery, 1962)

F N Souza’s stunning draughtsmanship and rich, if unsettling, imagination has earned him a significant... “Souza is an image-maker… His art lies in his power to strengthen the eye’s image of this world by distorting it, until it becomes merely the language by which his own mental images are expressed, and the common ground on which we may come to terms with them.” - EDWIN MULLINS (F N Souza, New Delhi: Kumar Gallery, 1962)

F N Souza’s stunning draughtsmanship and rich, if unsettling, imagination has earned him a significant position in the cannon of modern Indian art. His series of ‘Heads’ from the 1950s are among his most important and well-known figurative works. These portraits served as conduits for him to expose the most primitive aspects of human nature and its depravities throughout his career.

In defiance of the academic realism that dominated art at the time, Souza’s bold, often disruptive use of line and colour is neither strictly realistic nor wholly abstract. The artist frequently distorted the features of his subjects, sometimes eliminating them altogether. In the present lot, a 1951 ‘Head’ from early in his oeuvre, he uses an economy of line to depict the subject as a hollow form and trace its personal psychological tensions. The curved lines and thick nose ring are also evocative of the South Indian bronzes and Khajuraho carvings that often inspired his portrayal of nude female figures.

As art critic Yashodhara Dalmia observes, “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, ridged strokes of paint squeezed straight from the tube onto the canvas… 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.” (Yashodhara Dalmia, “A Passion for the Human Figure,” The Making of Modern Indian Art, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2001, p. 93)

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