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Lot 65

 

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The present lot was painted a year after F N Souza co-founded the Progressive Artists’ Group with S H Raza, M F Husain, K H Ara, H A Gade, and Sadanand Bakre. Though short-lived, the group played a decisive role in defining the course of modern Indian art after Independence. In its manifesto, Souza declared, “Today we paint with absolute freedom for contents and techniques, almost anarchic; save that we are governed by one or two sound elemental... The present lot was painted a year after F N Souza co-founded the Progressive Artists’ Group with S H Raza, M F Husain, K H Ara, H A Gade, and Sadanand Bakre. Though short-lived, the group played a decisive role in defining the course of modern Indian art after Independence. In its manifesto, Souza declared, “Today we paint with absolute freedom for contents and techniques, almost anarchic; save that we are governed by one or two sound elemental and eternal laws, of aesthetic order, plastic coordination and colour composition.” (Geeta Kapur, “Francis Newton Souza: The Devil in the Flesh”, Contemporary Indian Artists, New Delhi: Vikas Publishing House Pvt. Ltd.,1978, p. 9)

Souza had been expelled from the J J School of Art two years earlier for participating in protests against the institution’s British director, Charles Gerrard, during the Quit India Movement. Undeterred, he continued his education independently through local libraries, where he encountered classical Indian sculpture and the works of European masters for the first time. As his biographer Edwin Mullins notes, “Souza made a passionate study of Indian art, and was particularly moved by the South Indian bronzes-with their symbolism and their astonishing feeling for movement-and by the sublimely erotic carvings on the temples of Khajuraho. Both of these made a lasting impression on him and were largely responsible for awakening the imagination of the young painter…” (Edwin Mullins, Souza, London: Anthony Blond Ltd., 1962, p. 16)

Disillusioned with what he saw as pale imitations of Western academic realism and salon art among his contemporaries, Souza forged a modernist language of his own. In the present lot, his experiments with distortion and the human figure take shape as he synthesises diverse influences, including the heavy contours of Rouault, the vivid stained-glass windows of his home state of Goa, and the expressive power of classical Indian sculpture. “I have made my art a metabolism. I express myself freely in paint in order to exist. I paint what I want, what I like, what I feel,” he declared. (Mullins, p. 17)

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