Francis Newton Souza

Christie’s London, The Art of Souza: Property from the Estate of Francis Newton Souza, 9 June 2010, lot 137 

Throughout the 1960s, Francis Newton Souza’s depiction of the human figure was tirelessly experimental. His bold complex heads of the 50s created with thick cross hatching became further distorted in the early 60s 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)

It was not just the painter himself who invoked the comparison with the famed Spanish modernist. Souza's biographer, Edwin Mullins, wrote in his 1962 publication: 'Like Picasso he is restlessly inventive, and the subtlety of his art is at times masked by the sheer vigour of his brushwork. Like Picasso, too, his inventions 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 has forgotten.' (E. Mullins, Souza, Anthony Blond, London, 1962, p. 40)

Painted a year after the biography was published and following a period of heady commercial success, the current lot reveals an artist pushing the boundaries of figuration to the extreme. His monstrous subject is executed with austere line and palette. Atop a ground of grey, Souza's creation is constructed of minimal, feathery black lines, with the focal element found in the floating and organic white forms, evocative of bones, and two claw-like flourishes in brilliant red. The deformed creature possesses human elements, with the suggestion of a mouth with the eight white teeth, and the collar, rendered in green outlines, grounding it within the vague conventions of a portrait.

Produced in 1963, Untitled dates to an apex year in Souza's production, which saw the creation of landmark works such as The Deposition and Girl with Silken Whip. This was a time of immense creativity for the artist, and whilst the aforementioned '63 paintings explored Souza's seminal themes of religion and the female nude through his signature impasto, the present lot is part of another important strand of his varied production. Here, we witness Souza defying the limitations of the human face and exploring his medium. This is one of a number of canvases created during the early 60s where the painter deployed polyvinyl acetate with oil and pastel. This technique further blurred the lines and realities of figuration, and highlighted the texture of the canvas, giving the works a shroud-like quality, suggestive of Souza's interest in early religious portraiture.

Rebecca M. Brown's description of Souza heads of the 60s in Goddess, Lion, Peasant, Priest captures the particular power of this period in the artist’s oeuvre:

‘Grotesque, forceful, jabbing gestures emerging from the canvas, tools scrape away the paint surface, texture merges with colour to form a dynamic image of self… The frontality of the figures demands our attention, while the dissolution into energetic gestures, and the escape from the confines of the skull and the body, ask us to question the stability of the self. In these works, Souza explores what it means to be Indian in a postcolonial, globalizing world.”

(R. Brown, Goddess, Lion, Peasant, Priest, Modern and Contemporary Indian Art from the Collection of Shelley and Donald Rubin, Oglethorpe University Museum of Art, Brookhaven, 2010, p. 76)