Important Notice

“I started using more than two eyes, numerous eyes and
fingers on my paintings and drawings of human figures
when I realised what it meant to have the superfluous and
so not need the necessary. Why should I be sparse and
parsimonious when not only this world, but worlds in space
are open to me?” - F N SOUZA

F N Souza’s rebellious nature and compulsive drive to create fuelled an artistic practice marked by constant... “I started using more than two eyes, numerous eyes and
fingers on my paintings and drawings of human figures
when I realised what it meant to have the superfluous and
so not need the necessary. Why should I be sparse and
parsimonious when not only this world, but worlds in space
are open to me?” - F N SOUZA

F N Souza’s rebellious nature and compulsive drive to create fuelled an artistic practice marked by constant experimentation and innovation, particularly in the early decades of his career. After being expelled from the J J School of Art in Bombay in 1945, he went on to co‒found the Progressive Artists’ Group, which sought not only to challenge the academic conventions that had long governed art education in India, but also establish new modes of expression for Indian modernism. Emerging in 1947, a watershed year of political and cultural change for the country, the PAG became one of the most influential modernist collectives of post‒Independence India.

He also briefly joined the Communist Party of India during this time. Although he shared the party’s socialist values, he left after reportedly being urged to use his art to advance its political agenda. Resistant to being told what kind of art he should produce, he later wrote in Words & Lines, “I was estranged from many cliques who wanted me to paint what would please them. I do not believe that a true artist paints for coteries or for the proletariat. I believe with all my soul that he paints solely for himself. 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.” (F N Souza, Words & Lines, London: Villers Publications Ltd., 1959, p. 10)

Though Souza was facing personal turmoil when he painted the present lot in the 1960s, professionally he was at the height of his creative powers and had achieved considerable recognition in post‒War Britain. During this decade, he experimented extensively with unusual materials, such as treated satins and calicos as his canvas, as well as new styles and mediums. These experiments resulted in seminal series such as his monochromatic Black on Black paintings, chemical drawings, and Souza Kalam, a series of gouaches made in collaboration with artist Mohan Sharma.

He also continued to challenge the conventions of figurative painting through his iconic heads which, according to art historian Yashodhara Dalmia, “introduced his most inventive features that bring to the fore his whole painterly arsenal.” (Yashodhara Dalmia, “A Passion for the Human Figure”, The Making of Modern Indian Art: The Progressives, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2001, p. 93) The bold, rigid heads of the 1950s disfigured by thick cross‒hatching became further distorted in the early 1960s, resulting in increasingly complex mutated forms. With characteristic audacity Souza boldly claimed, “I have created a new kind of face... I have drawn the physiognomy way beyond Picasso, in completely new terms. And I am still a figurative painter...He stumped them and the whole of the western world into a shambles. When you examine the face, the morphology, I am the only artist who has taken it a step further.” (Artist quoted in Dalmia, p. 94)

The present lot showcases the influence of the collaborative partnership Souza initiated with Mohan Sharma, who came from a family of Nathdwara painters and was trained at the J J School of Art, graduating in 1965, the year this work was made. Souza invited the young artist to collaborate on a series of small‒scale works on paper that was exhibited at the Taj Art Gallery in Bombay that same year. With subjects chosen by Souza, this series brought together his masterful linework with Sharma’s technique of painted gouache. Emphasising the importance of draughtsmanship to his practice, Souza explained, “The outline is the scaffolding on which you hang your painting. It is the structure without which art cannot exist and becomes wishy washy... Within the structure you add paint and paint and structure are one and the same. There is a totality about it.” (Artist quoted in Yashodhara Dalmia, “The Underbelly of Existence”, The Demonic Line: An Exhibition of Drawings, 1940 – 1964, by Francis Newton Souza, New Delhi: DAG, 2000, p. 3)

Here Souza produces an image of extraordinary finesse and dexterity. The figure stands rigidly, its elongated face sprouting multiple antennae‒like eyes and wearing a strychnine grin. The delicate, rounded lines of the head and tubular eyes contrast with the geometric patterning on the face and torso. This style offers an interesting counterpoint to the highly Expressionist Black on Black paintings, with subjects sculpted from thick impasto and vigorous linework, which he was also producing during this period. Yet even as Souza reimagines the figure through characteristic distortion to show angels “what men and women really look like”, there is little doubt that it is ultimately human. (Artist quoted in Edwin Mullins, Souza, London: Anthony Blond Ltd., 1962, p. 82) As art critic Edwin Mullins explains, “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.” (Mullins, p. 39)

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