Francis Newton Souza (1924 - 2002)

Acquired in Bombay circa 1960s by Mrs. Priti Currimbhoy (née Misra), founder of the Taj art gallery and Dr. Angelo Tealdo, Managing Director of Ceat Tyres
Thence by descent

Very minor cracking to areas of thicker impasto. Some losses to pigment along bottom and top. Paint shrinkage and minor craquelure to areas of thick impasto. The reds appear slightly brighter than in catalog illustration. Frame: Joints of frame at corners are slightly separated.
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Souza is extoled for his magnificent landscapes, which formed the majority of his works created in the 1950s and 1960s. After his move to England in 1949, he was awarded a government scholarship and study tour around Italy in 1960 and during that time he visited numerous European capitals including Rome, Madrid and Amsterdam. This exposure to the various cityscapes across the continent served as the framework for his compositions during this time. This painting could be an abstracted depiction of Rome based on the cathedral, steeples and architecture.

This work is executed with a multitude of paint layers in four distinct colours, white, red, ochre and black. The limited palette brings to focus Souza’s mastery with linear and geometric conformation. Gone were the sentimental and bucolic scenes he painted in India in the early 1940s, ushering in a new era of landscapes that captured the essence of his surroundings with complex mastery. With as much expression and radicalization as his portraits, this architectonic horizon of buildings is painted tightly against each other in a staunchly cubist manner. Souza is exploiting every available inch on this canvas to construct his cityscape, forming a series of overlapping and multi-faceted buildings, compressing perspective and forcing the structures to collapse on each other.

The powdered white sky is in constant flux and tension, highlighting Souza’s gestural application of paint  and juxtaposing the sharp lines and abstraction of the structures below it. George Butcher writing in The Studio in November 1961 called him a ‘figurative action painter.’ (E. Mullins, Souza, Anthony Blond Ltd., London, 1962, p. 38) The moniker is very evident in this landscape which was painted two years later.

'Souza’s landscapes seem to be driven by a cataclysmic force, which wreaks havoc. Most of these cityscapes following, at first, a simple rectilinear structure, which later, in the 1960s, gives way to an apocalyptic vision. The tumbling houses in their frenzied movement are also symbolic of all things falling apart, of the very root of things being shaken, of a world of the holocaust and thalidomide babies.' (Y. Dalmia, The Making of Modern Indian Art: The Progressives, New Delhi, 2001, p. 93). Despite the apparent angst of these early cityscapes there is also an evident joy in the use of thick oils applied liberally to the canvas or board, with layers of color built upon one another and then merged together with swift strokes of the brush or knife. Mullins states that Souza has 'succeeded in creating images which are entirely personal, yet recognisable at the same time.  They are often distorted to the point of destruction - houses no more than lopsided cubes...but they never threaten to dissolve into formalized abstract shapes.  The violence and speed with which they were executed keep these images, however distorted, in touch with the painter's vision of what they really are.' (E. Mullins, Souza, Anthony Blond Ltd., London, 1962, p. 37).

Sharp steeples adorned with a crucifix and a domed cathedral constitute some of the imposing structures visible in this painting. The use of thick black outlines to separate the buildings also reveals the influence of the stained glass windows in the Roman Catholic churches of Goa as well as the churches that he visited in Europe during his travels. By incorporating the spiritual influences of his childhood within these tightly ordered compositions, Souza has created a body of work where religion and Modernity coexist. 'In moving to Europe, he has never lost touch with the art that first inspired him. Souza is not an artist who changes his style every now and then as fashions come along: he is a painter who has developed an imagery which is strongly his own. […] The result is a synthesis of traditions and styles, and at the same time the evolution of an original talent which has stolen its greatest powers from no one.' (E. Mullins, Souza, Anthony Blond Ltd., London, 1962, p. 44-45)  While a great number of painters at the time chose to veer towards complete abstraction, Souza was one of the few important Indian Modernists that unwaveringly maintained figuration in his works.