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Lot 47

 

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The mid-1950s were a transformative period for F.N. Souza, witnessing his rise from near-destitution to artistic and literary fame. By 1957, “Souza had certainly become something of an artistic celebrity…and if an exhibition had focused on ‘sensation’, Souza’s work would surely have been chosen for its very powerful and virulent imagery.” According to the critic Andrew Forge, who reviewed Souza’s work in The Listener that year, “Somewhere behind... The mid-1950s were a transformative period for F.N. Souza, witnessing his rise from near-destitution to artistic and literary fame. By 1957, “Souza had certainly become something of an artistic celebrity…and if an exhibition had focused on ‘sensation’, Souza’s work would surely have been chosen for its very powerful and virulent imagery.” According to the critic Andrew Forge, who reviewed Souza’s work in The Listener that year, “Somewhere behind any serious portrait painting there is a wish to gain command of the person portrayed…But in Souza you can see the real thing operating. You can see him closing in on his images as though they could save his life or backing away from them as though they could kill him. Souza himself has said that he has made of his art ‘a metabolism’. ‘I express myself freely in paint in order to exist’…This is a sight of art at work, of painting made from dire necessity” (Aziz Kurtha, Francis Newton Souza: Bridging Western and Indian Modern Art, Mapin Publishing Pvt. Ltd., Ahmedabad, 2006, p. 41, 42).

In the present lot, a large and unusual work that seems to straddle the divide between the voluptuous nudes and the critical portraits of saints and gentlemen he painted at the time, Souza distances himself from conventional aesthetics to project his true feelings about the subject through her painted image. In this painting, like much of Souza’s work, “A rational treatment of the theme, however radical or modern…is dismissed as being too superficial and external to cope with experiences where the instinctual and the refined, the bestial and the spiritual are so inextricably fused that only a non-‘aesthetic’ language, shorn of civilized niceties, can hope to portray the perverted pantomime of human relationships” (E. Alkazi, “Souza’s Seasons in Hell”, Art Heritage, Season 1986-87, New Delhi, p. 74).

Although this ‘Imbecile Girl’, as the artist has labeled her, is dressed and made-up with bright red lips, pink cheeks and brushed hair, she wears nothing below her green blouse. Her features, like those of Souza’s male subjects, are frozen in a mask-like countenance: the vacant eyes set high in the forehead, the tubular nose drawn down to the barred teeth, and the neck entirely missing. Set against a lurid red background fractured by Souza’s strong black line, the girl’s hands absentmindedly rest in her bare lap, almost as it they are framing her genital area to direct viewers’ attention there, and transform them into instant voyeurs.

Originally belonging to Harold Kovner, who assembled one of the most important and prestigious private collections of Souza’s work between 1956 and 1960, this painting reflects the new exuberance with which Souza was painting at the time. Having met and struck a lucrative deal with Kovner at Galerie Iris Clert in Paris, Souza was finally free of debt. According to Edwin Mullins, the artist’s biographer, “The arrangement was a perfectly simple one. Souza was to keep him supplied with pictures every few months – entirely of the artist’s choosing – and in return Kovner would keep him supplied with money. It lasted four years, and Mr. Kovner is now the owner of nearly 200 Souzas. It was a case of patronage of the most simple and practical kind, and needless to say it enabled Souza to live without acute financial worries for the first time in his life” (Souza, Anthony Blond Ltd., London, 1962, p. 26).

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