Important Notice

F N Souza’s works featuring heads are a sharp indictment of the hypocrisy and extractive decadence of the Church and the secular bourgeoisie. These portraits with cruel eyes placed high on the forehead, vicious bared teeth and brutishness set in the severe lines of the face are “a combined portrait of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, sly, evil and at the same time terrified.” (Geeta Kapur, “Devil in the Flesh”, Contemporary Indian Artists, New... F N Souza’s works featuring heads are a sharp indictment of the hypocrisy and extractive decadence of the Church and the secular bourgeoisie. These portraits with cruel eyes placed high on the forehead, vicious bared teeth and brutishness set in the severe lines of the face are “a combined portrait of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, sly, evil and at the same time terrified.” (Geeta Kapur, “Devil in the Flesh”, Contemporary Indian Artists, New Delhi: Vikas Publishing House Pvt Ltd, 1979, p. 27) The present lot was painted by Souza as part of Saffronart and Apparao Galleries’ Los Angeles Residency Programme in 2001. This revisitation of the artist’s trademark style is also likely one of the last heads he created before his death the following year.

Set against a flat red background, Souza emphasises the grotesqueness of the head through the uneven complexion rendered in ochre, yellow and green which gives the impression of insalubrity. Souza, a noted draughtsman, used his remarkable understanding of anatomy to unsettling effect by distorting human physiognomy: the high small eyes with prominent bags underneath, the mouth, askew and open with numerous sharp teeth on display, and the misplaced ears create an image of a man “with death in the soul, all life petrified, without a shred of humanity.” (Yashodhara Dalmia, “The Underbelly of Existence,” The Demonic Line: F N Souza - An Exhibition of Drawings, 1940 - 1964, New Delhi: DAG, 2000, p. 4)

This late work recalls an early iteration of the head in the series Six Gentlemen of Our Times, 1955. They were later published in his book Words and Lines with these words that reflected his abhorrence of the hypocrisies of those in powerful positions: “And if God sends his Son again you will have to break Him in His very bones so that He will not rise again. But think of the Lord Mayors and the Bishops and the R.S.P.C.A. officials and all the little good-mongers, officials, ecclesiastical and civil, running up and down the city street… your suffering is far more complex than the obviously simple tortured expression of one crowned with thorns, and impaled with nails.” (“Notes From My Diary,” F N Souza, Words and Lines, New Delhi: Nitin Bhayana Publishing, 1997, p. 20 accessed online via SrimatiLal.com)

While the malevolence of the figures of Six Gentlemen of Our Times was expressed partly through profuse cross-hatching, the figure in the present lot is defined by another of Souza’s distinctive pictorial elements: the bold black line. In assessing artist’s oeuvre, art critic Yashodhara Dalmia says, “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.” (“A Passion for the Human Figure,” Yashodhara Dalmia, The Making of Modern Indian Art, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2001, p. 93)

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