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Lot 48

 

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Riding on the crest of a wave of successes in London, both literary and artistic, F.N. Souza’s output in the late 1950s comprised some of his strongest works, including several important portraits like the present lot.

Compelled to paint the human figure in an effort to document both the beauty and depravity of his race, Souza’s portraits became channels for his scathing social commentary, frequently centered on the dual issues of sex... Riding on the crest of a wave of successes in London, both literary and artistic, F.N. Souza’s output in the late 1950s comprised some of his strongest works, including several important portraits like the present lot.

Compelled to paint the human figure in an effort to document both the beauty and depravity of his race, Souza’s portraits became channels for his scathing social commentary, frequently centered on the dual issues of sex and religion, pleasure and suffering, which absorbed the artist throughout his career. Offering insight into his personal life as well as his beliefs, these portraits unmasked the hypocrisy of the clergy and the gentry, exposing their ‘soullessness’ for all to see. “A growing skill in expressing the grotesque allowed Souza to dwell on the cunning manipulation by the rich, thereby extending his liturgy of the decadent…The denouement of the upper classes, with their underlying violence masked by vestments of polite behaviour, is complete…Deploying his faces, as it were, to expose the larger hypocrisy of nations…the essential condition of human beings, of men without redemption” (Yashodhara Dalmia, The Making of Modern Indian Art: The Progressives, Oxford University Press, 2001, p. 82-84).

In the present lot, Souza offers his viewers a portrait of a middle-aged, featureless man, distinguished only by the heavy black coat he is wearing. His features, according to the artist, are ‘baked’ in place, not betraying any hint of emotion or empathy. Suggesting, perhaps, that the subject, like others of his social standing, is no better than a cold stone statue, Souza has carved his face in thick impasto, leaving the streaks from the edges of the palette-knife running across it like veins in marble.

Mulling on the reactions portraits like the present lot provoke, Souza’s biographer Edwin Mullins explains, “If he were creating monsters, probably no one would be troubled; but because his images are clearly intended to be human, one is compelled to ask why his faces have eyes high up in the forehead…why he paints mouths that stretch like hair combs across the face…Souza’s imagery is not a surrealist vision – a self-conscious aesthetic shock – so much as a spontaneous re-creation of the world as he has seen it, distilled in the mind by a host of private experiences and associations” (Souza, Anthony Blond Ltd., London, 1962, p. 39)

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