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Lot 49

 

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1956, the year in which the present lot was executed, was a seminal one for Souza, following his successful artistic and literary debut in London the previous year. His first solo show at Gallery One won critical acclaim, as did his first publication, the semi-autobiographical essay, “Nirvana of a Maggot”. Riding the crest of this wave of critical and commercial success, which alleviated his financial hardships and struggle to find acceptance,... 1956, the year in which the present lot was executed, was a seminal one for Souza, following his successful artistic and literary debut in London the previous year. His first solo show at Gallery One won critical acclaim, as did his first publication, the semi-autobiographical essay, “Nirvana of a Maggot”. Riding the crest of this wave of critical and commercial success, which alleviated his financial hardships and struggle to find acceptance, Souza’s paintings and drawings of the mid and late 1950s comprise some of his best works.

Of these works, the artist’s portraits of the “tortured saints” he recalls from his early years in Goa are legendary. Disfiguring icons like St. Peter, St. Sebastian and John the Baptist, these gruesome paintings not only offer us insight into the artist’s life, but are also a significant source of his social and religious commentary. “If he was 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, and limbs that branch out like thistles. 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” (Edwin Mullins, Souza, Anthony Blond Ltd, London, 1962, p. 39).

Here, the artist portrays the head of a saint, already pierced by arrows, as a grotesque mass of putrefying flesh, held in place only by his characteristic thick black outlines. With his mask-like countenance, barred teeth and vacant expression in his high-set eyes, this saint is far from a beatific martyr. In this modern-day icon, Souza forsakes ecclesiastic grandeur to reveal instead the truth that lies beneath its ornamental robes; similarly, the benevolence associated with religious martyrdom is transformed into something more closely resembling the ferocity of a wounded animal. Explaining the inversions of these mocking images with his characteristic flair Souza once stated that while “Renaissance painters painted men and women making them look like angels… I paint for angels, to show them what men and women really look like” (as quoted in Ibid., p. 82).

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