Important Notice

"I have created a new kind of face... When you examine the face, the morphology, I am the only artist who has taken it a step further," wrote Souza, whose distorted heads and faces were powerful expressions of what he saw as the embodiment of hypocrisy embodied by the elite and the clergy. The present lot was painted in 1963, at the height of an era concerned with the Cold War and fears of a nuclear holocaust, and consequently, the mutant face... "I have created a new kind of face... When you examine the face, the morphology, I am the only artist who has taken it a step further," wrote Souza, whose distorted heads and faces were powerful expressions of what he saw as the embodiment of hypocrisy embodied by the elite and the clergy. The present lot was painted in 1963, at the height of an era concerned with the Cold War and fears of a nuclear holocaust, and consequently, the mutant face and distortions are an expression of Souza's personal and political fears. In this respect, it has something in common with Francis Bacon's paintings of the Pope in the 1950s. Seated in clerical garb on a throne-like seat, the tentacled, distorted subject in the present lot is both scathing and fearful. "The post-war angst that had inflicted the whole of Europe and the works of artists like Francis Bacon and T S Eliot would also draw in its fold a painter like Souza, with his indictment of a soulless society." (Yashodhara Dalmia, The Making of Modern Indian Art: The Progressives, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2001, p. 89)

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