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Lot 48

 

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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…Souza’s treatment of the figurative image is richly varied. Besides the violence, the eroticism and the satire, there is a religious quality about his work which is medieval in its simplicity and in its unsophisticated sense of wonder” (Edwin Mullins, Souza, Anthony Blond Ltd., London, 1962, p. 33, 40).

Created with Souza’s characteristic impasto and aggressive black line, this dignified portrait of a priest or nobleman draws both from the religious iconography he encountered as a child in Catholic Goa, and from the work of Renaissance and Spanish Romanesque painters that he came across after moving to London in 1949. Also influenced by Cubism and paintings like Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907), Souza bestows the figure in this work with sculptural qualities, using light and shadow to skillfully project him beyond the two-dimensional surface and heighten the impact he has on the viewer.

Although he is dressed in a boxy tunic embellished with emerald buttons and an intricately patterned neck piece, the subject of this painting, with his vacant expression, seems joyless, highlighting what Aziz Kurtha terms the “sorrow of emotional poverty and the soulless grandeur of inherited power”. This man, “…has no trace of pleasure on his troubled face but he is adorned with the accoutrements of royal privilege which seem to tie him down” (Francis Newton Souza: Bridging Western and Indian Modern Art, Mapin Publishing, Ahmedabad, 2006, p. 85).

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