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Lot 56

 

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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" (Edwin Mullins, Souza, Anthony Blond Ltd., London, 1962, p. 33).

Offering insight into his reading of human society, Souza's figurative paintings from the mid and late 1950s are considered by many to be some of his most seminal works. As Mullins notes, "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" (Ibid., p. 40). Unmasking what the artist saw as the hypocrisy of so-called 'men of faith', the wealthy and the powerful, these portraits aimed to expose their dark 'soullessness' for everyone to see.

"A growing skill in expressing the grotesque allowed Souza to dwell on the cunning manipulation by the rich, thereby extending his liturgy of the decadent…The denouement of the upper classes, with their underlying violence masked by vestments of polite behaviour, is complete…Deploying his faces, as it were, to expose the larger hypocrisy of nations…the essential condition of human beings, of men without redemption" (Yashodhara Dalmia, The Making of Modern Indian Art: The Progressives, Oxford University Press, New Delhi, 2001, p. 82-84).

The present lot, executed in 1959, is an unusual group portrait of three 'businessmen' in which Souza turns his critical eye to the realm of capitalism, expressing what he saw as the greed and exploitative actions of his subjects through his disfiguring brushstrokes. Executed the same year as 'Politicians', another disparaging take on the insensitivity and hypocrisy of those in positions of authority other than the Roman Catholic Church, this important painting draws from sources ranging from traditional African masks to the Cubist works of Braque and Picasso, displaying the breadth of Souza's experiences and influences. Here, the artist darkens and disfigures two of his subject's faces, fracturing them into angular facets to reflect their greed and excesses. The face of the third, central figure, however, is left relatively unscathed, indicative, perhaps, of the misleading facades of the others that Souza sees through and exposes for his viewers.

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