Important Notice

Painted in 1958, the present lot sees F N Souza at the height of his career. The work depicts a monumental, icon‒like bust of Christ set against an urban backdrop, bringing together two defining genres of his art—the pseudo‒religious portrait and the cityscape. By this time, according to critic Geeta Kapur, Souza had become “the first Indian artist to become something of a sensation in the West. For that matter, even among his Western... Painted in 1958, the present lot sees F N Souza at the height of his career. The work depicts a monumental, icon‒like bust of Christ set against an urban backdrop, bringing together two defining genres of his art—the pseudo‒religious portrait and the cityscape. By this time, according to critic Geeta Kapur, Souza had become “the first Indian artist to become something of a sensation in the West. For that matter, even among his Western contemporaries, he stood pretty high on the ladder of success, and it goes without saying that he deserved it. Place him for a moment beside two figurative Expressionists like Graham Sutherland in England and Bernard Buffet in France, the two painters with whom he invites obvious comparison, and one will realize how much more sharply Souza impresses himself on one...” (Geeta Kapur, “Francis Newton Souza: Devil in the Flesh”, Contemporary Indian Artists, New Delhi: Vikas Publishing House Pvt Ltd, 1978, pp. 11‒12) The same year, Souza was selected as one of five painters, alongside Ben Nicholson, John Bratby, Terry Frost, and Ceri Richards, to represent Great Britain in the Guggenheim International Award.

Souza moved from Bombay to London in 1949 in search of a more receptive audience for his art and remained there for almost two decades. After five years of struggling to establish himself as an artist, he achieved a breakthrough in 1955 with his debut solo exhibition at Gallery One, run by Victor Musgrave. The exhibition coincided with poet Stephen Spender’s publication of his autobiographical essay, “Nirvana of a Maggot”, in the February issue of Encounter. The show attracted the attention of several prominent critics including John Berger, Edwin Mullins, and George Butcher, marking the beginning of Souza’s rise in the British art world. The following year he travelled to Paris, where he met Harold Kovner, a wealthy New Yorker who agreed to pay him a monthly stipend in exchange for paintings of the artist’s choosing. This patronage brought Souza a measure of financial security that allowed him to produce some of his most significant works over the next four years, including the present lot which was originally part of Kovner’s personal collection.

Souza was once a devout Roman Catholic boy raised in Portuguese‒ruled Goa where, in his words, his “beginnings were small and secret, and growth was by contact with Christ.” (Artist quoted in Edwin Mullins, Souza, London: Anthony Blond Ltd., 1962, p. 70) He eventually came to view the Church as hypocritical and corrupt and gave up his faith, yet the institution permeated his art and gave him one of his most persistent themes. A Christ‒like figure occupies the centre foreground of the present lot, rendered in the distinctive style of the male head that the artist introduced in the early 1950s, with eyes characteristically placed high on the forehead and elongated facial features culminating in a pointed beard. Although the figure’s proportions are deliberately distorted, it is less aggressively disfigured through dense cross‒hatching and forceful mark‒making than some of Souza’s other heads from this period. Instead, the figure appears sombre and almost benevolent.

The frontal composition and the bold, black contours of paint with which Souza sculpts the figure invite comparison with the work of French Expressionist Georges Rouault, whose devout Catholicism informed his biblical subjects, particularly his representations of Christ. However, as Kapur notes, unlike Rouault Souza’s Christ “singularly lacks or rejects the quality of compassion…Suffering is ignoble, he proposes in his images, and there is no trace of sublimity in the face of those whom he shows to be suffering.” (Kapur, p. 17) The painting also recalls the medieval quality of Byzantine icons and Spanish Romanesque art which were another strong influence on the artist. Kapur writes, “The hieratic figures in Catalonian frescoes with their wide‒eyed hypnotic gaze and ritualistic gestures are delineated with a sharp, precise line and enfolded in elaborately embroidered, richly coloured garments... Souza’s paintings [...] show that he adopted not only that peculiar transfixed aspect of the medieval image but specific details such as the manner of delineating the facial features and modelling the limbs with a faint shadow on the inside of a distinct black outline.” (Kapur, p. 19)

“There is a religious quality about his work which is medieval in its simplicity and in its unsophisticated sense of wonder. Some of the most moving of Souza’s paintings are those which convey a spirit of awe in the presence of a divine power...”
(Edwin Mullins, Souza, London: Anthony Blond Ltd., 1962, p. 40)

Dressed in ecclesiastical robes but without the crown of thorns that signifies martyrdom, Souza’s Christ appears more human than divine—both sinner and saviour poised between salvation and damnation. The angled, cube‒like buildings and what appears to be a church spire that flank the figure create an ambiguous setting. Their forms are equally suggestive of the brick townhouses and cottages of Hampstead Heath, where Souza was living at the time, and the quaint village architecture of Goa, his birthplace. Describing his approach to painting landscapes Souza remarked, “I work a lot from photographs… I often paint my landscapes from photographs. Or rather I begin to paint them from photographs. In the end they are mostly collective images of many places I’ve known all rolled into one. Bits of Bombay, a street in Barcelona, a tree in Rome.” (Artist quoted in Mervyn Levy, “F N Souza the Human and the Divine,” G S Whittet ed., Studio Vol 167 No 852, April 1964, pp. 135 ‒ 36)

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