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Lot 92

 

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F.N. Souza painted the present lot at the request of his wife, Maria, who had purchased a 1942 gouache with the same title, in Souza's first exhibition in Mumbai in 1945. She became his first collector and through the purchase of the original Ave Maria, she met Souza, worked with him and other senior Indian artists to galvanize the Progressive Artists’ Group, and later, as his wife, supported him financially in London until he achieved success,... F.N. Souza painted the present lot at the request of his wife, Maria, who had purchased a 1942 gouache with the same title, in Souza's first exhibition in Mumbai in 1945. She became his first collector and through the purchase of the original Ave Maria, she met Souza, worked with him and other senior Indian artists to galvanize the Progressive Artists’ Group, and later, as his wife, supported him financially in London until he achieved success, in 1955.

After Souza moved to New York in 1967, he found it difficult to persuade galleries to exhibit the art he began creating, in which he responded to the new art emerging in America that was shifting the leadership of world art from Europe to the United States. In 1975 and again in 1984, Maria offered Souza exhibitions at her gallery, Arts38, in London. Before his second exhibition in 1984, she asked him to paint another ‘Ave Maria’ for her.

This painting demonstrates Souza's originality, never copying what he had already created but using the earlier ‘Ave Maria’ as a point of departure to express what he perceived as the evolution of art and its changing style, forty years after his first exhibition in India.

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