Important Notice

Lot 8

 

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By 1957, "Souza had certainly become something of an artistic celebrity…and if an exhibition had focused on 'sensation', Souza's work would surely have been chosen for its very powerful and virulent imagery." According to the critic Andrew Forge, who reviewed Souza's work in The Listener that year, "Somewhere behind any serious portrait painting there is a wish to gain command of the person portrayed…But in Souza you can see the real thing... By 1957, "Souza had certainly become something of an artistic celebrity…and if an exhibition had focused on 'sensation', Souza's work would surely have been chosen for its very powerful and virulent imagery." According to the critic Andrew Forge, who reviewed Souza's work in The Listener that year, "Somewhere behind any serious portrait painting there is a wish to gain command of the person portrayed…But in Souza you can see the real thing operating. You can see him closing in on his images as though they could save his life or backing away from them as though they could kill him. Souza himself has said that he has made of his art 'a metabolism'. 'I express myself freely in paint in order to exist'…This is a sight of art at work, of painting made from dire necessity" (Aziz Kurtha, Francis Newton Souza: Bridging Western and Indian Modern Art, Mapin Publishing Pvt. Ltd., Ahmedabad, 2006, p. 41, 42).

The present lot, titled 'Portrait of a Greek Girl', seems to straddle the divide between the voluptuous nudes and the critical portraits of saints and gentlemen he painted at the time. Typically choosing to portray his women as full figure nudes, this portrait seems almost restrained in comparison. Here, the subject is clothed, and although her features are delineated by Souza's strong line and her figure has been cropped at the waist like the many male heads that he created during the same period, she does not share their violently disfigured faces or the arrows that usually pierce their skin. Perhaps an allusion to the strong women who helped shape Souza's life, including Maria Figueiredo, his wife at the time and later one of his most supportive dealers, this figure is serene and confident as she stares out of the frame.

The deep crimson background bears a motif similar to the pendant that the subject wears, perhaps a nod to her Mediterranean heritage, while her face "...appears to be a modern adaptation of a handsome female image from Greek antiquity" that Souza perhaps encountered on one of his many museum visits in the early 1950s (Ibid., p. 77).

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