Important Notice

“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.”
- F N SOUZA

F N Souza’s fraught relationship with organised religion provided him with inspiration for some of the most powerful imagery of his career. The Catholic church had been deeply embedded in the fabric of his life as a young boy living in Portuguese-ruled Goa. Yet as he... “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.”
- F N SOUZA

F N Souza’s fraught relationship with organised religion provided him with inspiration for some of the most powerful imagery of his career. The Catholic church had been deeply embedded in the fabric of his life as a young boy living in Portuguese-ruled Goa. Yet as he matured, the boy who had once dutifully accompanied his grandmother to mass and “knelt and prayed for hours” became disillusioned by the church’s representatives, whom he came to view as duplicitous, embodying the very sins that they claimed to condemn. (F N Souza, Words and Lines, New Delhi: Nitin Bhayana Publishing, 2000, p. 10) In the 1940s, Souza’s art shed light on the struggles of the poor, but by the 1950s and 1960s, his focus shifted to exposing the greed and corruption of the cloth. He laid bare the contradictions of the church through biting portraits of saints, martyrs, and religious figures and proclaimed: “I use aesthetics instead of knives and bullets to protest against stuffed-shirts and hypocrites.” (Artist quoted in F N Souza, London: Gallery One, 1961 p. 3)

Referencing these paintings critic Geeta Kapur remarks, “…the theme of hypocrisy and the Church, in so far as it symbolises absolute authority and camouflages with subtle cunning the hypocrisies of the elite, has remained one of the most important subjects of his paintings [...] The recurring portraits of priests, prophets, cardinals, and Popes are therefore to be taken literally for what they are but also symbolically as representatives of institutions and authority, only more treacherous in that they claim divine sanction. That is to say, the villains of the Catholic Church he represents are both real and allegorical. It is this double connotation of fact and symbol and his interlocked feelings of secret fascination and objective disgust which make Souza’s handling of religious figures so unique.” (Geeta Kapur, “Francis Newton Souza: Devil in the Flesh”, Contemporary Indian Artists, Vikas Publishing House Pvt. Ltd., New Delhi, 1978, pp. 19 - 20)

After facing initial challenges breaking into London’s art scene, Souza’s fortunes began to change by the late 1950s. By the early 1960s, he had achieved international recognition, exhibiting in Paris, Sweden, Stuttgart, and the United States. His most successful solo exhibition took place at Gallery One in 1961, followed by the publication of a monograph on his work by critic Edwin Mullins the next year. The present lot was created two years later in 1964.

The work combines two subjects that have defined Souza’s art-a clergyman in a priest’s tunic and a townscape with geometric buildings and towering steeples. A similar painting, Two Saints in a Landscape, was acquired by the Tate Gallery in London in 1965. For Souza, religious representatives such as saints and priests were both figures of veneration and revulsion, a paradox which he wrote about in his 1955 essay ‘Nirvana of a Maggot’. He refers to their execution of religious duties as a business rather than spiritual calling, writing: “The vicar of the village church was a man of great religious fervour, unlike those others one meets in Goa who take priesthood and make it a mercenary end. The sacerdotal profession is a lucrative business there. The vicar and I became friends […] a sinner could be a good friend of a saint and a saint must necessarily be a friend of the sinner.” (Souza, p. 17)

The composition draws equally from Spanish Romanesque traditions of painting religious figures and European expressionism and is made especially striking by Souza’s masterful draughtsmanship. His iconic bold black lines recall formative influences such as the stained-glass windows of Goan churches and the works of French painter Georges Rouault. Remarks Yashodhara Dalmia, “Not only did it form the sinews of his work but it existed primarily as an independent expressive means [...] the sheer simplicity of the line which achieved a phenomenal power in Souza’s hands could take on the debris of existence.” (Yashodhara Dalmia, “The Underbelly of Existence”, The Demonic Line: An Exhibition of Drawings 1940 – 1964, New Delhi: DAG, 2001, p. 3)

The clergyman assumes a composed posture with clasped hands and yet his elongated face, with eyes perched high on his forehead in a piercing glare, betrays an underlying malevolence. His frontal gaze-typical of many of Souza’s portraits-is influenced by the hieratic figures in Catalonian frescoes “with their wide-eyed hypnotic gaze and ritualistic gestures [that] are delineated with a sharp, precise line and enfolded in elaborately embroidered, richly coloured garments [...] And yet the hieratic forms are treated ironically, turned inside out in a manner startling to say the least and quite often sinister [...] he uses the transfixed, frontal aspect of the figure to convey a feeling of petrification associated with authority.” (Kapur, p. 19)

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