Important Notice

"It is in depicting heads that Souza introduced his most inventive features that bring to the fore his whole painterly arsenal. His use of colour is conventional with thick, rigid strokes of paint squeezed straight from the tube on to the canvas. Their burnished quality is reminiscent of the old masters, its expressive content not fully exploited and not in cohesion with the radical quality of the subject." (Yashodhara Dalmia, "A Passion for the... "It is in depicting heads that Souza introduced his most inventive features that bring to the fore his whole painterly arsenal. His use of colour is conventional with thick, rigid strokes of paint squeezed straight from the tube on to the canvas. Their burnished quality is reminiscent of the old masters, its expressive content not fully exploited and not in cohesion with the radical quality of the subject." (Yashodhara Dalmia, "A Passion for the Human Figure", The Making of Modern Indian Art, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2001, p. 93)

Souza's heads and human forms first appeared in the late 1940s, undergoing gradual transformations over time - from the cross-hatching technique that became the hallmark of his early works, to loops, whorls and squiggles delineating the distorted visages of his subjects. Souza was inventive in his figurations; the iconic line of his rigid heads, reminiscent of Romanesque art, gave way to tubular forms, as seen in the present lot. The circular spots scattered on the head and around it, resembling pockmarks, had begun to appear in some of his works during the 1960s. The alien-like tentacles extending from the face would become a more prominent feature as he continued to experiment, well into the 1980s.

Painted in 1968 - a year after Souza moved to New York - the present lot stands at a turning point in the artist's career. After nearly two decades of success in London, Souza once again found himself struggling for recognition in a city he eventually came to consider overtly commercial.

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