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Lot 48

 

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Following a visit to Italy on an Italian government scholarship in 1960, Souza painted a series of townscapes quite unlike the bleak visions of London and its surroundings that dominated his work during the early and mid 1950s. These scenes were not uninviting; their structures, tumbling one over the other, expressed dynamism and power rather than gloom and lethargy.

The present lot, one of Souza’s more unusual landscapes from the... Following a visit to Italy on an Italian government scholarship in 1960, Souza painted a series of townscapes quite unlike the bleak visions of London and its surroundings that dominated his work during the early and mid 1950s. These scenes were not uninviting; their structures, tumbling one over the other, expressed dynamism and power rather than gloom and lethargy.

The present lot, one of Souza’s more unusual landscapes from the period, is striking in both its nocturnal setting and its unconventional verticality. Here, a rising and falling band of yellow houses cuts through the darkness of the night, separating the black-green land from the inky blue sky. Defined by Souza’s characteristically thick black outlines, the houses almost glow from the intensity with which they have been executed. Stacked precariously on top of each other, these structures seem to heave and sway in unison, the arches and windows of one barely discernable from the towers and roofs of another.

“Of the pictorial elements it is decidedly the line which is the most developed part of Souza’s vocabulary. Whether it is ornamental or abrupt, lyrical or diabolic, Souza’s line is derived from Picasso; from Picasso’s unmatched virtuosity in delineating an object or figure with sheer element of line… His paintings are really drawn in paint, the line predominating over all other elements and serving to outline, encase and define an image; serving also to provide tonal variations… and to give the painting a structural and surface unity” (Geeta Kapur, “Devil in the Flesh”, Contemporary Indian Artists, Vikas Publishing House Pvt. Ltd., New Delhi, 1978, p. 56, 57).

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