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Lot 41

 

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The Roman Catholic Church, which dominated religious life in Goa, F.N. Souza’s birthplace, had a significant impact on the artist’s life and work. The many churches of the former Portuguese colony, with their overwhelming architecture and impressive rituals, left a lasting impression on him. Souza was fascinated by their grand services, pomp and ceremony, and their use of elaborate ornate symbols and robes. Most of all, however, it was the icons... The Roman Catholic Church, which dominated religious life in Goa, F.N. Souza’s birthplace, had a significant impact on the artist’s life and work. The many churches of the former Portuguese colony, with their overwhelming architecture and impressive rituals, left a lasting impression on him. Souza was fascinated by their grand services, pomp and ceremony, and their use of elaborate ornate symbols and robes. Most of all, however, it was the icons of suffering saints and the image of Christ martyred on the cross that affected and stayed the artist, repeatedly appearing in his work, albeit in altered forms, throughout his career. Amongst his memories of the Church, the strongest and most detailed is of “the enormous crucifix with the impaled image of a Man supposed to be the Son of God, scourged and dripping, with matted hair tangled in plaited thorns” (as quoted in Edwin Mullins, Souza, Anthony Blond Ltd., London, 1962, p. 42).

Souza, however, soon came to see the dogma of the Church as hypocritical and repressive, and the institution’s use of guilt in manipulating its congregations as sordid. Although he became increasingly adverse to the ideals of Catholicism, his body of work was consumed by depictions of what he understood to be the religion’s subversive influence. As Geeta Kapur explains, “The one continuing theme Souza explores…is the theme of hypocrisy and the Church, in so far as it symbolises absolute authority and camouflages with subtle cunning the hypocrisies of the elite…The recurring portraits of priests, prophets, cardinals, and Popes are therefore to be taken literally for what they are but also symbolically as representatives of institutions and authority, only more treacherous in that they claim divine sanction…It is this double connotation of fact and symbol and his interlocked feelings of secret fascination and objective disgust which make Souza’s handling of religious figures so unique” (Contemporary Indian Artists, Vikas Publishing House, New Delhi, 1978, p. 20).

Sometimes the impact of Catholicism in Souza’s paintings is subtle; a sacred chalice in a still life, or a series of martyr’s thorns protruding from a distorted head. In others, like the present lot, one of the artist’s most derisive canvases on the theme, Souza confronts the Church and its teachings head on. In this revolutionary piece, the iconic image of Christ’s crucifixion is rendered with malevolence rather than empathy. The gaunt martyr appears grotesque rather than forgiving or accepting, with his bared, fang-like teeth, vacant eyes and tangled, spiked hair. Standing against a cloudy blue sky, the other figures in this large painting are defined by Souza’s confident, thick line. Like the martyr they supposedly mourn, Souza has disfigured and distorted these men and women gathered at the base of the cross, who appear to be heckling rather than grieving the crucified figure. In this painting, then, the mood set by the artist is one of revulsion rather than piety, recalling medieval scenes of heretics burning at the stake.

Initially exhibited at Grosvenor Gallery, London, in a 1964 show titled ‘The Human and the Divine Predicament’, this canvas is closely related to Souza’s contentious 1959 painting, ‘Crucifixion’, which is part of the Tate Museum’s permanent collection.

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