Francis Newton Souza 1924-2002 Untitled, after Titian's Venus of Urbino and Manet's Olympia

Ragnar Zedell, Stockholm
Christopher P Wood
Private Collection, London

The most famous icon of Love in art is Venus. The goddess of love and beauty (Venus in Roman mythology, Aphrodite in Greek) has inspired painters and sculptors for over two thousand years. The best-known rendering of Venus in classical art is the Greek statue, the Aphrodite of Milos (130 B.C.), better known as the Venus de Milo (currently housed in the Louvre Museum in Paris). In non-classical art, perhaps the most famous painting of this divine figure is Titian’s Venus of Urbino (1538), originally painted for the Duke of Urbino (presently displayed at the Galleria degli Uffizi in Florence). Although the pose of Titian’s Venus was taken from Giorgione’s Sleeping Venus, a somewhat chaste anthropomorphism of the goddess, Titian painted a more earthly Venus rendering her as flesh and bone that is unabashedly sensuous and unapologetically erotic. Mark Twain, when traveling through Italy in 1880, wrote after seeing Titian’s Venus, that it was “the foulest, the vilest, the obscenest picture the world possesses”; adding, “it isn’t that she is naked and stretched out on a bed—no, it is the attitude of one of her arms and hand. If I ventured to describe that attitude there would be a fine howl—but there the Venus lies for anybody to gloat over that wants to—and there she has a right to lie, for she is a work of art, and art has its privileges." Twain was referring to the position of Venus’s left hand, which either conceals or caresses her genitals: Titian leaves it to the viewer (or voyeur) to decide.

When Edouard Manet’s Olympia (1865), was presented at the Paris Salon three centuries later, it incited an outpouring of vitriol from critics and viewers alike, outraged by Manet’s brazen (in their eyes) disregard for the decorum that the French Academy accorded the nude female figure and subject. In Manet’s Olympia, now hanging in the Museé dOrsay, Paris, Venus’s status of divinity has been desecrated by her transfiguration into a working class woman. The love, beauty and amorous nature of Venus that has been associated with her divine powers through time, has degenerated into the lecherous pose of a prostitute beckoning her clients.

One hundred years after Manet's Olympia, in 1961, Francis Newton Souza, by then established as an important British artist after his emigration from India to London in 1949, painted the untitled work in this lot. Although at first glance it appears that Souza was paying homage to Titian, whose mastery he clearly acknowledged (see Souza’s Man in Red Cloak, 1959; Death of a Pope, 1957, et al), gone is the soft sensuality of Titian’s Venus. Souza’s nude, with its extreme flesh tones, defiant gesture and unyielding stare shares a closer alliance with Manet’s Olympia than with the Venus of Urbino. The allegiance to Manet’s painting is not immediately obvious unless one is aware of the historical context in which Manet’s painting first appeared. And the familiarity of Titian’s Venus of Urbino, arguably the most beautiful nude in non-classical Western art, makes it an easy contender for the source of Souza’s inspiration. But Souza, who was a consummate draftsman and whose line drawings of females clothed and nude demonstrate an unwavering ability to render the beauty of the female outline and visage exquisitely, chose to exclude these qualities from this painting. Souza’s nude lies on a bed that is drawn from Titian’s Venus but in a pose taken from Manet’s Olympia. In Souza’s painting, classic and modern art collide to forge a new milestone in Indian and European art history. Souza takes Manet’s theme of class distinctions further, referencing in his own work not only the sexuality and promiscuity evident in Olympia but the domination of India by England. Souza joined the Quit India Movement in 1945 and fought for India’s independence from British rule. He depicts Indian servants in the background, a dominant white female figure (Britannia rules) in the foreground. But the female is no longer sensual: like Manet’s Olympia her seduction is no longer alluring. (Shelley Souza, 2007)

Shelley Souza is co-administrator for the artist's estate and a trustee of the Francis Newton Souza Foundation.