Important Notice

“Souza is a painter with a powerful and strange personal vision. His paintings are neither primitive nor ‘cultured’. They either move you by their stark interpretation of the visual world, or they repel you...He is an image-maker and not an aesthete or a theorist. These are earth paintings, and their impact lies in the artist’s power to distort and strengthen the eye’s image of this world, and to produce an effect almost shocking in its... “Souza is a painter with a powerful and strange personal vision. His paintings are neither primitive nor ‘cultured’. They either move you by their stark interpretation of the visual world, or they repel you...He is an image-maker and not an aesthete or a theorist. These are earth paintings, and their impact lies in the artist’s power to distort and strengthen the eye’s image of this world, and to produce an effect almost shocking in its intensity” (Edwin Mullins, Souza, Anthony Blond Ltd., London, 1962, p. 33).

One of Souza’s earlier landscapes, the row of houses in the present lot are not distorted with the furious brushstrokes he adopted in the early 1960s, and do not topple over each other in apocalyptic fashion. Instead, they stand quite still in a simple box-like line, each geometric form coloured in a different jewel-tone, together dividing the sky from the land. A single, bare tree that interrupts these horizontal bands temporarily, suggests that this landscape perhaps represents an English winter morning, which Souza became more sympathetic towards following his eventual artistic recognition and success in the country in 1955. Here, Souza’s expertly controlled use of colour illuminates each component of this painting, infusing the work with a sense of wonder, despite its desertedness.

Like most of Souza’s work from this period, each element in this horizontal composition is given shape and form by the thick black lines that the artist has used to delineate them. Speaking about the power of this line, Geeta Kapur notes that, “Of the pictorial elements it is decidedly the line which is the most developed part of Souza’s vocabulary. Whether it is ornamental or abrupt, lyrical or diabolic, Souza’s line is derived from Picasso; from Picasso’s unmatched virtuosity in delineating an object or figure with sheer element of line…His paintings are really drawn in paint, the line predominating over all other elements and serving to outline, encase and define an image; serving also to provide tonal variations…and to give the painting a structural and surface unity” (“Devil in the Flesh”, Contemporary Indian Artists, Vikas Publishing House Pvt. Ltd., New Delhi, 1978, p. 56, 57).

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