Francis Newton Souza

Osian's Mumbai, 9 September 2006, lot 21

There is craquelure in the surface of the painting. Scattered small losses throughout. This painting would benefit from a light clean. Please note that this work has been previously cleaned, consolidated, infilled and re-stretched. UV light: extensive retouching and consolidation are visible under ultra-violet light.
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Old Man From The Pale Settlement is a striking example of Francis Newton Souza’s characteristic style; bursting with energy and spontaneity. The present lot, layered with thick impasto encapsulates the artist’s remarkable ability to handle paint. The distorted figure of the man executed in bright colours and framed by thick black outlines is inspired by Pablo Picasso. Souza has stated, ‘As you know, Picasso redrew the human face, and they were magnificent. But I have drawn the physiognomy way beyond Picasso, in completely new terms. And I am a figurative painter […] When you examine the face, the morphology, I am the only artist who has taken it a step further.’ (Y. Dalmia, The Making of Modern Indian Art: The Progressives, Oxford University Press, New Delhi, 2001, p. 94)

The human figure has undergone innumerable stylistic experimentations in Souza’s storied yet highly prolific oeuvre, and always rendered with bravura, perhaps because of his obsession with portraying the hypocrisy of society through his art. ‘Souza’s treatment of the figurative image is richly varied. Besides the violence, the eroticism and the satire, there is a religious quality about his work which is medieval in its simplicity and in its unsophisticated sense of wonder.’ (E. Mullins, Souza, Anthony Blond Ltd., London, 1962, p. 40). The present rendition of the human form was painted at a time in the 1960s when Souza had moved on to depicting bodies that were even more distorted than in his paintings from the late 1950s.