Lot 35

 

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Critic Edwin Mullins’ described F N Souza as “a painter with a powerful and strange personal vision”, a quality most clearly embodied by his iconic series of heads which he first introduced in the late 1940s. He subverted the conventions of traditional portraiture, producing grotesquely disfigured human faces in his raw, highly idiosyncratic style. Freed from the constraints of realism, these figures became intense psychological studies and... Critic Edwin Mullins’ described F N Souza as “a painter with a powerful and strange personal vision”, a quality most clearly embodied by his iconic series of heads which he first introduced in the late 1940s. He subverted the conventions of traditional portraiture, producing grotesquely disfigured human faces in his raw, highly idiosyncratic style. Freed from the constraints of realism, these figures became intense psychological studies and searing commentaries on the state of humanity and Souza’s view of man as inherently malevolent and beyond redemption.

Souza was born in Portuguese-ruled Goa and raised as a strict Roman Catholic. Although he eventually grew disillusioned with the institution and embraced atheism, he continued to engage with religious themes in his art throughout his career. His heads often assumed the form of saints, popes, priests, and clergymen, allowing him to turn them into pointed critiques of the moral authority of the Church and expose what he saw as the contradictions between Christian ideals and the conduct of those who preached them.

In the present lot Souza portrays St Sebastian, recognisable only by the trademark arrows that pierce his face and neck. Painted in 1957, the work was produced during the early years of what would become the most successful decade of his career. According to legend, St Sebastian served as an officer in the Imperial Roman army under Diocletian in the 3rd century. He practised Christianity in secret and was condemned to death, bound to a tree, and shot with arrows for aiding persecuted Christians. After miraculously surviving, he confronted Diocletian again for which he was beaten to death. His cult gained prominence during the bubonic plague of the 14th century, when he came to be venerated as a protector against disease with the plague’s painful buboes symbolically associated with the wounds inflicted by arrows.

St Sebastian is one of the most frequently represented martyrs in the canon of Western art, famously portrayed by Renaissance masters such as Mantegna, Rubens, and Titian as the paragon of male beauty. Souza, however, made the subject his own. Here he paints him in the style of the distinctive type of male head he had devised a few years earlier in 1955, and for which he is best known. With high-set eyes, an elongated nose with hatched lines on either side, and a mouth pulled into a stiff, teeth-baring grimace, the figure appears monstrous rather than benevolent.

Though Souza did not pay deference to religious figures, he was fascinated by the concept of martyrdom and drawn to St Sebastian as a symbol of persecution and suffering. The saint appears multiple times in his works, both overtly and symbolically through the presence of arrows, his most enduring iconographic attribute. Geeta Kapur observes, “The device of the arrow incidentally serves him time and again. Sometimes the arrows are as small as needles, sometimes as long as lances and Souza uses them for the purpose of a kind of voodoo, destroying the enemy by piercing his stuffed effigy. Indeed the way he rigs up his image with his brushwork, the way he mauls it, stamps it, suggests that he quite believes in the magical efficacy of images.” (Geeta Kapur, “Francis Newton Souza: Devil in the Flesh”, Contemporary Indian Artists, New Delhi: Vikas Publishing House Pvt Ltd, 1978, p. 28)

The artist, whose own face bore permanent scars after surviving a bout of smallpox as a young child, may have identified with St Sebastian in the same way as the sufferers of the Black Death. Souza also perceived himself as a kind of martyr, having endured hardship, social prejudice, and political orthodoxy in his relentless pursuit of artistic freedom. In the years following the artist’s death art critic John Berger wrote, “If I had to sum up that presence, I would say it was that of a martyr. The confrontation within him between pain and voluptuousness, fury and calm, are comparable, I believe, to those often discovered in martyrdom.” (John Berger quoted in Anne Macklin ed., Mr Sabastian, London: Grosvenor Gallery, p. 9)

“As a child I was fascinated by the grandeur of the Church and by the stories of tortured saints my grandmother used to tell me.” - F N SOUZA

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