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Lot 46

 

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For F. N. Souza, the founder of the Progressive Artists' Group and a driving force behind a new idiom for Modern Indian art, the 1950s were transformative for his career. He was given a grant to work and study in Paris in 1952, and he seized the opportunity to establish several important connections with Western European gallerists, dealers and collectors. In 1954, a Paris dealer offered to hold a one-man exhibition for him later that year.... For F. N. Souza, the founder of the Progressive Artists' Group and a driving force behind a new idiom for Modern Indian art, the 1950s were transformative for his career. He was given a grant to work and study in Paris in 1952, and he seized the opportunity to establish several important connections with Western European gallerists, dealers and collectors. In 1954, a Paris dealer offered to hold a one-man exhibition for him later that year. Souza held several solo and group exhibitions while there. His bold and unconventional art was noticed by a few enthusiastic patrons who went on to fuel his artistic career over the next decade.

One of his most important patrons, Harold Kovner, was a wealthy American collector who owned Park East and Park West Hospitals in Manhattan, which he operated until 1970. He was among Souza's earliest patrons and collected around two hundred works during his four-year patronage. Kovner came across Souza's paintings in 1956 at Gallery Iris Clert in Paris. It was the same year in which Pagoda Head was made.

Edwin Mullins, who wrote a comprehensive biography of the artist in 1962, writes of Kovner's encounter with Souza's art: "Kovner, a wealthy American, had come over from New York to find a young artist whom he could take up. He saw Iris Clert, who showed him all her pet abstracts, artist by artist. Kovner remained unimpressed. Finally, and with some reluctance, she let him downstairs and produced several paintings by Souza. Kovner jumped. Within 24 hours he had met Souza, given him money, taken away some pictures, made arrangements for the future, and was flying back to New York. The arrangement was a perfectly simple one. Souza was to keep him supplied with pictures every few months - entirely of the artist's choosing - and in return Kovner would keep him supplied with money....It was a case of patronage of the most simple and practical kind, and needless to say it enabled Souza to live without acute financial worries for the first time in his life" (Edwin Mullins, Souza, Anthony Blond Ltd., London, 1962, pg. 26).

Kovner's patronage also coincided with a period in which Souza created some of his most significant figurative works. The theme of heads, with their thick black lines surrounding flat planes of colour, was common in Souza's work in the 1950s. They bore hints of the works of Picasso and Rouault, yet Souza gave these works a personal stamp. Pagoda Head was perhaps one of the initial set of paintings consigned for Kovner. While the head is distorted, as Souza does with many of his figures, it is envisioned as a pagoda: an oriental shrine dedicated to Buddha that houses sacred relics and is comprised of multiple tiers. The structure of the face corresponds with the eaves of a pagoda, though not with the same architectural precision. Souza's choice of a pagoda also ties in with his preoccupation with religion. Among his paintings that addressed religion, he typically criticised what he saw as the hypocrisy of clergymen. By choosing to construct this figure - possibly a man of faith or even one of the affluent - as a multi-tiered pagoda, Souza questions his intentions while making a powerful, corrosive reference to his emptiness.

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