Important Notice

Lot 40

 

Quick Zoom

According to the critic David Sylvester, "The importance of Francis Newton Souza the young Goan painter who has settled in London is that he has resolved the dilemma of style as no other modern Indian artist has done. He has crossed Indian bazaar painting with the Picasso style…to produce a manner that is at once individual and consistent and which might be said to suggest a caricature of a Byzantine icon" ("A Goan Painter", The New Statesman,... According to the critic David Sylvester, "The importance of Francis Newton Souza the young Goan painter who has settled in London is that he has resolved the dilemma of style as no other modern Indian artist has done. He has crossed Indian bazaar painting with the Picasso style…to produce a manner that is at once individual and consistent and which might be said to suggest a caricature of a Byzantine icon" ("A Goan Painter", The New Statesman, 14 December 1957).

Painted in the same year as the two of the artist's other seminal works, Mystic Repast and Man with Monstrance, the present lot combines Souza's powerful figurative idiom with a magnificent still life. Influenced by the uneasy relationship that the artist shared with organised religion throughout his life, specifically Roman Catholicism, this painting critically interrogates the notion of divine sanction through the representatives and objects of this faith.

As the artist explained to his first biographer, Edwin Mullins, "The Roman Catholic church had a tremendous influence over me, not its dogmas but its grand architecture and the splendour of its services. The priest dressed in richly embroidered vestments, each of his garments from the biretta to the chasuble symbolising the accoutrements of Christ's passion" (Souza, Anthony Blond Ltd., London, 1962, p. 42). Soon, however, Souza also became aware of what he perceived as the pretences and hypocrisy of his religion and its proponents. Ever since, his life and work have been marked by the tension he constantly experienced between the adherence to his faith and the urge to harshly criticize it.

"The one continuing theme Souza explores…is 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…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…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, "Devil in the Flesh", Contemporary Indian Artists, Vikas Publishing House Pvt. Ltd., New Delhi, 1978, p. 20).

In the present lot, Souza presents Catholicism as nothing deeper than vestment, decoration and ceremony - an ornamental faith based on appearances, words and objects rather than people. The figure, likely a priest, is dressed in a dull gold tunic with a cross-hatched pattern at the neck. However, rather than a grand countenance to match his robe, Souza renders his subject's face almost mask-like, with large, empty eye sockets, robbing him of all traces of humanness. Symbolic perhaps of a blind leader, he stands behind an altar-like platform on which ecclesiastical objects like the Ciborium, Chalice and Patens have been placed.

"Mullins has correctly observed that Souza does not fit into the progression of still life painters proceeding from Dutch paintings of dining tables with fresh fruits and flowers, nor to the Cubist type of still life with varied perspectives on the same object. Souza's still lifes, as in this picture, achieve a sort of religious quality" (Aziz Kurtha, Francis Newton Souza: Bridging Western and Indian Modern Art, Mapin Publishing, Ahmedabad, 2006, p. 110).

Read More
Artist Profile
Other works of this artist in: this auction  |  entire site