PROPERTY FROM A GENTLEMAN, MUMBAI
Francis Newton Souza
UNTITLED (HEAD)
LOT SOLD.
40,00,000 INR
Details & Cataloguing
Boundless: India
|
Mumbai
Mumbai
Francis Newton Souza
1924 - 2002
UNTITLED (HEAD)
Signed and dated 'Souza 56' upper right
Mixed media on paper
27 ¼ x 21 in. (69 x 53.2 cm.)
Executed in 1956
Read Condition Report
Read Condition Report
Mixed media on paper
27 ¼ x 21 in. (69 x 53.2 cm.)
Executed in 1956
Provenance
Collection of Mr. Ragnar Zedell, Sweden
Christie's New York, 20 September 2006, lot 24
Acquired from the above by current owner
Christie's New York, 20 September 2006, lot 24
Acquired from the above by current owner
Catalogue Note
One of the greatest strengths of Souza's work is that he remained tirelessly experimental. The bold complex heads of the 1950s created with thick cross hatching become further distorted in the early 1960's to result in complex mutated forms. The artist states "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." (Y. Dalmia, 'A Passion for the Human Figure', The Making of Modern Indian Art: The Progressives, Oxford University Press, New Delhi, 2001, p. 94)
Edwin Mullins compared Souza to Pablo Picasso stating, 'with his finest paintings …the concentrated passion with which they were created may seem to burn over the canvas, yet the nature of the passion is less easy to place. They are full of apparent contradictions: agony wit, pathos and satire, aggression and pity. Their impact is certain but few people are able to explain what has hit them. Like Picasso, too, his interventions have tended to be thought outrageous, because the imagination that created them was discovering something about the visual world which no one as yet understood or which everyone had forgotten.’ (E. Mullins, F. N. Souza, Anthony Blond, London, 1962, p. 37).
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