Important Notice

F N Souza’s rebellious nature was entrenched in his art. His daring drove him to establish the Bombay Progressive Artists’ Group in 1947 and forge a new type of Indian modernism independent of the Western academic realism that predominated at the time. Though his career was defined by figuration, landscapes also form an integral part of his oeuvre and demonstrate his command over form and space. He and his contemporaries, such as S H Raza, Akbar... F N Souza’s rebellious nature was entrenched in his art. His daring drove him to establish the Bombay Progressive Artists’ Group in 1947 and forge a new type of Indian modernism independent of the Western academic realism that predominated at the time. Though his career was defined by figuration, landscapes also form an integral part of his oeuvre and demonstrate his command over form and space. He and his contemporaries, such as S H Raza, Akbar Padamsee, and K H Ara, continually experimented with the genre, each evolving their own artistic language. In a 1989 article published in The Times of India, Souza remarked, “We can now look back and be surprised at how those of us from the Progressive Artists’ Group, Raza, Gade and myself, completely broke away from the wishy-washy 19th century English watercolourists, an influence which prevailed in Bombay even in the 1940s, and came into our own individual styles. Our landscapes were not only very different from those of British painters like Turner and Constable but from the French impressionists too, although we were also modern. We were bold and full of fire. Our landscapes were full of brilliant colours!” (F N Souza, “Red Trees, Black Skies,” The Times of India, 4 June 1989)

The natural splendour of his home state of Goa, its icons and stained-glass churches provided Souza with his first lessons in figuration and colour. In his autobiography, Words and Lines, he writes lyrically of its landscape describing “a country full of rice fields and palm trees, whitewashed churches with lofty steeples; small houses with imbricated tiles, painted in a variety of colours. Glimpses of the blue sea...” (F N Souza, Words and Lines, London: Villiers Publications Ltd., 1959, p. 9) But despite this narrative, he often subverted the placid, idyllic image of the landscape as a genre in his art. With swift, disruptive linework and colour, his canvases give way “to an apocalyptic vision. The tumbling houses in their frenzied movement are also symbolic of all things falling apart, of the very root of things being shaken, of a world of the holocaust and thalidomide babies. The swirling and whirling trees [...] are those of nature gone awry, of a demonic energy behind the appearance of things. (Yashodhara Dalmia, “A Passion for the Human Figure,” The Making of Modern Indian Art, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2001, p. 93)

The present lot underscores Souza’s reputation as a prodigious draughtsman. The work is built up entirely in bold, energetic strokes of paint with his signature thick, black lines delineating houses that sway and tumble against each other and cut across the centre of the canvas. There is drama and movement in these lines and a masterful tension is created between the built environment and nature, the latter depicted in strokes of blue and green. Geeta Kapur has remarked that, “Of the pictorial elements it is decidedly the line which is the most developed part of Souza’s vocabulary… 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.” (Geeta Kapur, “Devil in the Flesh”, Contemporary Indian Artists, Vikas Publishing House Pvt. Ltd., New Delhi, 1978, p. 56, 57). In contrast to the dark, ominous tones he used during the Post-War period of the 1950s and 1960s, the present lot is painted with vivid colours, which he began introducing into his landscapes after his move from London to New York in 1967.

To borrow his own words, Souza’s landscapes are “treacherous like Satan, beautiful like him”. (Souza, p.11) His frenzied strokes convey a feeling of urgency that suggests a certain compulsion to paint. In the present lot, he uses distortion, which frequently characterises his figurative works, to create a sense of disquiet despite the bright colour palette, and yet the architectural forms remain discernible. In his monograph on the artist, Edwin Mullins notes that his landscapes “…are often distorted to the point of destruction-houses no more than lopsided cubes…But they never threaten to dissolve into formalized abstract shapes. The violence and speed with which they are executed keep these images, however distorted, in touch with the painter’s vision of what they really are.” (Edwin Mullins, Souza, Anthony Blond Ltd., London, 1962, pp. 36-38)

Read More
Artist Profile
Other works of this artist in: this auction  |  entire site