This work comes at a significant period in the life of Souza – at a time when Souza as
an Indian artist, was striving to make a name for himself critically and commercially
in London. This piece was painted in 1956, a year after the artist finally broke
into the London art scene when Victor Musgrave hosted his first solo exhibition
at Gallery One, then a small space he ran on Litchfield Street. In addition, Souza’s
autobiographical essay about Goa, Nirvana of a Maggot, had just been published
in the journal ‘Encounter’, edited by acclaimed poet Stephen Spender and he was
making waves in the literary world as well.
This particular piece is also significant in terms of its style. Though Souza employed
his characteristic heavy impasto and the black lines in its creation, this work is
particularly significant in its lack of violence and disfiguration of the central
character. Combining his iconic townscapes with his equally infamous heads, it
seems at first that Souza has forsaken the eroticism, satire and religious commentary
that were his trademarks at the time, for a simple man about town, dressed in a suit
and tie.
However, on closer inspection, it seems the artist is indeed making a comment in
this work, though implicitly rather than through coarse satire. This piece captures
the circumscribed life of a town dweller, who, wearing a defeated expression, seems
subsumed by the dreariness and drudgery of everyday life over which he can exercise
no control. Souza evokes a number of emotions through this man – compassion and
anger to name a few – as well as introspection about the viewer’s own life.
According to Edwin Mullins, who published the first monograph on Souza in 1962,
his portraits like this one are “full of apparent contradictions: agony wit, pathos and
satire, aggression and pity. Their impact is certain but few people are able to explain what
has hit them.”
– Edwin Mullins , Souza, 1962, p.39
Alternatively, this piece, titled The Student, may be read as a satirical comment on
formal systems of education, with which Souza never had a good experience. He
was expelled first from his Jesuit high school in Bombay, thwarting his plans to
become a Catholic priest, and then, five years later, from the Sir J. J. School of Art in
the same city, cutting short his academic training as a painter. Formal education to
Souza, then, was a constraint rather than an instrument of realizing ones aspirations,
and, in that light, this work is perhaps a comment on the ‘system’, and its power to
summarily mute passions and pigeon-hole lives.