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Lot 30

 

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‘If you want to convey fact, this can only ever be done through a form of distortion. You must distort to transform what is called appearance into image.’ - Francis Bacon

Some four hundred years after Titian’s Emperor Charles V, Francis Newton Souza painted Seated Man in Red. At first glance it appears that Souza is paying homage to Titian, whose mastery he acknowledges in several paintings and drawings of the 1950s and 1960s (Man in... ‘If you want to convey fact, this can only ever be done through a form of distortion. You must distort to transform what is called appearance into image.’ - Francis Bacon

Some four hundred years after Titian’s Emperor Charles V, Francis Newton Souza painted Seated Man in Red. At first glance it appears that Souza is paying homage to Titian, whose mastery he acknowledges in several paintings and drawings of the 1950s and 1960s (Man in Red Cloak, 1959, Death of a Pope, 1957, Titian’s Grandfather, 1955, Untitled, After Titian’s Venus of Urbino and Manet’s Olympia, 1961). However, Souza’s work is not a respectful portrait of a dynamic leader but an act of destruction. The present lot is one of Souza’s strongest and most disturbing visions of man and society.

Titian, having been appointed imperial court painter in 1533, portrays Charles V as a forceful and determined ruler. When he posed for this portrait in 1548, Charles V was the most powerful man in the world. He had recently won the battle of Mühlberg, in which he triumphed over Protestant armies and was heir to the Holy Roman Empire and the throne of Spain. When he was crowned in 1519, it seemed no one could resist his empire encompassing the Mediterranean, the Atlantic and central Europe. Titian shows Charles V seated on a finely carved chair, dressed in black robes. Behind him is draped an opulent gold tapestry, to his left a brightly coloured landscape and beneath his feet a rich red carpet. He looks out at the viewer with a steely and steadfast gaze. This is a man in the possession of great power and influence.

Souza was fascinated by the grandiose portraiture of Renaissance Europe, the strength of the colours used, the careful composition and the majestic subject matter. But unlike the Renaissance painters, Souza did not seek to present an idealised form to the viewer. As Edward Mullins describes, “Souza 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. 3).

Thus Souza takes Titian’s work and subverts it. The face of Souza’s seated man has been overpainted in white giving the subject a mask-like visage and robbing him of any traces of humanity. Where red pigment was just limited to the carpet in Titian’s work, in Souza’s it consumes every inch of the canvas bar the man’s face and hands and the addition of a ghostly white halo around him. The aggressive monotony of the redness gives the painting a violent and foreboding atmosphere. Souza’s use of red is suggestive of his fascination with the Roman Catholic church and its teachings. Within the church, red is a colour of great symbolism, from Pentecostal fire, to the blood of Christ. It is perhaps most significantly for Souza, the colour of authority adorning the robes and vestments of the priests and bishops and those of high society from royalty to men of justice.

The present lot is one of several disparaging portraits of figures in authority by Souza. The viewer is not witness to the subject’s supposed nobility, rather one is presented with a demonised figure. Souza’s painting is an act of exposing what lies beneath the regalia, a ridiculing of those who occupy positions of power and the blind faith that their subjects place in them. As Souza himself explains ‘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’ (Edwin Mullins, Souza, Anthony Blond Ltd., London 1962, p.82).

Souza’s paintings served as a channel for the artist’s scathing social and religious commentary. Seated Man in Red is Souza’s sharp criticism of the hypocrisy and soulless nature of men of wealth and power, from the cardinals to the rich businessmen drunk on the excesses of money.

The idea of producing variations on a work from the past is something many great artists have turned their hand to. Picasso reinterpreted works by painters such as Grünewald, Delacroix, Manet, and Rembrandt. Likewise, the masterpiece that stands out in the body of Francis Bacon’s works is his distortion of Velázquez’s Portrait of Pope Innocent X into a nightmarish screaming Pope (Study after Velázquez’s Portrait of Pope Innocent X, 1953)

Seated Man in Red, is both a seductive and disturbing image, shocking in its subject matter yet captivating in its drama and powerful use of colour. It is an outstanding example of the type of arresting image that Souza drove to achieve by putting brush to canvas. “But to give pleasure has never been Souza’s aim, and he holds little respect for other artists who set out to do so. He feels that a painter is rather like a furniture manufacturer who possesses an inner compulsion to build the most uncomfortable chairs he can, and then make people sit on them. Why, one may ask, this determination to offend? Why never to please? The answer is, I think that to Souza art is a form of propaganda, a means of hypnotising others into accepting his views of what the world is like. And because what he has to say is uncomfortable, he feels that his paintings must initially cause discomfort, or they have failed: they are sweetmeats” (Edwin Mullins, Introduction to The Human and the Divine Predicament: New Paintings by F.N Souza, Grosvenor Gallery, London, 31st March - 25th April 1964).

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