Important Notice

“It’s all very well talking in metaphors about having one’s roots in one’s own country. But roots need water from clouds forming over distant seas; and from rivers having sources in different lands.” - F N SOUZA

FN Souza’s art was shaped in large part by the Roman Catholic Church. Born in Portuguese- ruled Goa to a Roman Catholic family, Souza paid rapt attention to his grandmother’s stories of saints as a child. He was taken with the... “It’s all very well talking in metaphors about having one’s roots in one’s own country. But roots need water from clouds forming over distant seas; and from rivers having sources in different lands.” - F N SOUZA

FN Souza’s art was shaped in large part by the Roman Catholic Church. Born in Portuguese- ruled Goa to a Roman Catholic family, Souza paid rapt attention to his grandmother’s stories of saints as a child. He was taken with the pageantry and drama that the religion was famous for.

This present lot, drawn during a decade of illustrious output for the artist, features a nude figure wearing a veil resembling those often worn by the Virgin Mary in mass-produced prints ubiquitous in Catholic households the world over. This female nude is likely one of his “unfrocked saints” (David Sylvester quoted in Aziz Kurtha, “London, New York and the Subcontinent,” Francis Newton Souza: Bridging Western and Indian Modern Art, Ahmedabad: Mapin Publishing, 2006, p. 66). If read as a saint, Souza displays his notorious irreverence for religious iconography, the artist unceremoniously diminishes the venerated saint’s grandeur. In the 1960s Souza used figuration to explicitly bring sex and religion-understood by Catholic dogma as being in opposition to each other-into dialogue since for him “the all pervading and crucial themes of the predicament of man are those of religion and sex.” (F N Souza quoted in Mervyn Levy, “F.N. Souza: The Human and the Divine”, The Studio Volume 167 Number 852, London: Prism Publications Ltd., April 1964, p. 139). Artist Mervyn Levy, who associates religion with suffering and sex with pleasure in his assessment of Souza’s oeuvre, sums up the impetus of his art as, “F. N. Souza’s art is desperately and continually trying to dovetail the poles of suffering and joy; to accept and adjust the ugliness and the pain of life, with the beauty and the ecstasy of love-of human love-which is divine.” (Levy, p.139)

While the bold outlines and voluptuous figure of the nude are a nod to the classical Indian sculptures that Souza studied scrupulously as a young artist in Bombay, the work also reflects the profound influence of the Western art history canon on Souza, especially that of Henri Matisse, who was himself famously influenced by North African art and design. This illustrated lady would be almost one with her patterned backdrop if not hewn out by Souza’s trademark bold black lines, like a temple dancer from the rock. Like Matisse, who grew up amidst the vibrant colours and patterns of the weaving trade, Souza was raised in the colourful milieu of his mother’s Bombay dressmaking school where patterns, tactility and hue became sewn into the very fabric of the artist’s imagination.

This decorative background with its bold colours and repetitive criss-cross pattern is a departure from the artist’s usual flat backgrounds for his figures and is reminiscent of the ornamental textiles hanging behind Henri Matisse’s odalisques. Souza’s use of intense colours displays the influence of Expressionism on the members of the Progressive Artists’ Group, which he founded. He brings together the art traditions of his hybrid inheritance to create a singular powerful style that cannot be classed as part of one or the other. Talking about Souza’s work, the famed art writer John Berger has said, “How much Souza’s pictures derive from Western art and how much from the hieratic temple traditions of his country, I cannot say... It is obvious that he is a superb designer and an excellent draughtsman. But I find it quite impossible to assess his work comparatively because he straddles several traditions but serves none....” (John Berger quoted in Kurtha, p. 107)

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