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Lot 24

 

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The immediacy of figurative art always attracted F.N. Souza, who, throughout his career, remained compelled to draw and paint men and women in an effort to record both the beauty and the decadence of his race. In a 1986 interview the artist stated, “The advantage a figurative painter has over the abstract artist is sheer impact: the brute force of an expressionist painting of a large, distorted, suggestive naked lady can overwhelm the bravest... The immediacy of figurative art always attracted F.N. Souza, who, throughout his career, remained compelled to draw and paint men and women in an effort to record both the beauty and the decadence of his race. In a 1986 interview the artist stated, “The advantage a figurative painter has over the abstract artist is sheer impact: the brute force of an expressionist painting of a large, distorted, suggestive naked lady can overwhelm the bravest abstract painting – no doubt about it – because humans will be humans…The other most important advantage figurative art has over non-figurative art is that humans can transmit energy to humans through images whereas abstract symbols like the swastika, for example, must be charged with a lot of meaning by tradition before it can be taken to be potent” (as quoted in Yashodhara Dalmia, The Making of Modern Indian Art: The Progressives, Oxford University Press, 2001, p. 77).

Forever torn between the religious beliefs he was brought up with and the hypocritical practices of individuals and institutions that clouded them, Souza used his largely figurative body of work both as catharsis and social service, exposing the Janus-faced nature of those in positions of power. As he once famously stated, “Renaissance painters painted men and women making them look like angels…I paint for angels, to show them what men and women really look like” (as quoted in Edwin Mullins, Souza, Anthony Blond Ltd., London, 1962, p. 82).

The present lot, a large disfigured head painted in 1957, is an important example of a format Souza returned to repeatedly in his work. Drawing variously from traditional African art, medieval iconography, and Renaissance portraits, the artist would portray a single, unique head and torso against a relatively plain background to emphasize his views of powerful and orthodox individuals and society. As Geeta Kapur observes, “Around 1955 he fashioned for his purpose a distinctive type of head for which he is perhaps best known. It is a face without a forehead, bearded and pockmarked, eyes bulging from the side of the skull…a mouth full of multiple sets of teeth” (“Devil in the Flesh”, Contemporary Indian Artists, Vikas Publishing House Pvt. Ltd., New Delhi, 1978, p. 2).

In this painting, titled Broken Head, Souza fractures his subject’s elongated visage along several axes, giving it a three-dimensional, sculptural quality reminiscent of the African masks that inspired the Cubist works of Picasso and Braque. Along with its high set, rectangular eyes and its lightning-bolt nose, this head has been pierced by several thick black arrows, alluding to the hypocrisy and false piety of the members of clergy and elite society that it represents.

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