Important Notice

“Today my art rings with an apocalyptic message; with holocaust, thalidomide and the vision that man’s own inventive evil may transform him into a monster.” - F N SOUZA

F N Souza’s landscapes and cityscapes, which define his oeuvre along with his figurative works, were influenced by his personal experiences, the places he lived in and the sociocultural milieu of his times. The resplendent natural beauty of Goa, “full of rice fields... “Today my art rings with an apocalyptic message; with holocaust, thalidomide and the vision that man’s own inventive evil may transform him into a monster.” - F N SOUZA

F N Souza’s landscapes and cityscapes, which define his oeuvre along with his figurative works, were influenced by his personal experiences, the places he lived in and the sociocultural milieu of his times. The resplendent natural beauty of Goa, “full of rice fields and palm trees; whitewashed churches with lofty steeples; small houses with imbricated tiles, painted in a variety of colours. Glimpses of the blue sea…” (Artist in F N Souza, Words and Lines, New Delhi: Nitin Bhayana Publishing, p. 9 accessed via srimatilal.com) left a lasting impression on his entire body of work, but especially so on his earliest landscapes. By the 1960s, his landscapes had evolved greatly from the charming, picturesque watercolours of the 1940s which celebrated the majesty of the Goan countryside. Around this time, “a huge cracker seems to go off in the foundations of his cities and the buildings begin to sway and tumble and lean against each other in frantic postures.” (Geeta Kapur, “Francis Newton Souza: Devil in the Flesh”, Contemporary Indian Artists, New Delhi: Vikas Publishing House Pvt Ltd, 1978, p. 30)

The artist’s landscapes betray a palimpsest of influences from all the places he saw. Although he would begin working on them by visually referencing mass-produced photographs, his personal experiences would inevitably find their way into his art. By the time the present lot was painted in 1964, the artist had been a longtime resident of Hampstead Heath, the North London neighbourhood from which the work derives its name. Rather than render the area realistically, Souza, a “painter of the mind rather than of the eye” (Edwin Mullins, Souza, Anthony Blond Ltd., London, 1962, p. 33), creates a sense impression of a difficult decade. His personal pecuniary and creative troubles and battle with addiction, and general local abjection in the wake of a long war and following austerity came together to create a scene of doom, “a world that is grim, brilliant, harsh and sensual: a world with little time for compassion or mediation, but only for the recurring dream-like images of longing.” (Mullins, p. 40) The dense chaos of the painting, its tilted buildings vertically stacked to dizzying effect, is also reminiscent of Bombay, “with its rattling trams, omnibuses, hacks, railways, its forest of telegraph poles and tangle of telephone wires…”, where he had lived as a teenager and young adult. (Souza, p. 15) Speaking of his landscapes, Souza has said, “In the end they are mostly collective images of many places I’ve known all rolled into one. Bits of Bombay, a street in Barcelona, a tree in Rome. And often I introduce into my composite landscapes the livid green of Goa.” (Artist quoted in Mervyn Levy, “F.N. Souza: The Human and the Divine”, The Studio Volume 167 Number 852, London, April 1964, pp. 135-136)

Souza creates mayhem in flat perspective. Streaks of thick impasto, frantically applied, charge the canvas with a sinister energy with which the “city begins to appear like some predatory beast ticking with a feverish life, a nasty organism active in every little cell.” (Kapur, p. 5) The palette adds to the hallucinatory strangeness of the frame; a deep red moon looks over a city bathed only in its ominous light. The unnerving colour scheme could be attributed to Souza’s preference for working under electrical lights as opposed to making landscapes en plein air. The most striking element is his bold black line. The artist uses his considerable talents as a draughtsman to create the structural underpinning for the work. He outlines the forms in his iconic lines, building them up one by one to create a manic cityscape that is falling into itself as if in a vortex. Noting how Souza’s lines tie his work together, art critic Geeta Kapur says, “Of the pictorial elements it is decidedly the line which is the most developed part of Souza’s vocabulary… His paintings are really drawn in paint, the line predominating over all other elements and serving to outline, encase and define an image; serving also to provide tonal variations… and to give the painting a structural and surface unity.” (Kapur, p. 34)

Souza combines several techniques with virtuoso proficiency to present the unsparing face of mankind’s condition. Critic Richard Bartholomew, commenting on Souza’s gift for imbuing his works with the fundamental truth, wrote, “Souza can represent the essence of nature in a small, spontaneously assembled stilllife or suggest in an equally small landscape the meaning of place and time.” (Richard Bartholomew, “Presence of Time Evident in Souza’s Works”, Richard Bartholomew: The Art Critic, Noida: BART, 2012, p. 548)

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