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“...standing at the window, expressionless city man that you are, your suffering is far more complex than the obviously simple tortured expression of one crowned with thorns, and impaled with nails.” - F N SOUZA

F N Souza was born in 1924 into a devout Roman Catholic family in the then Portuguese colony of Goa, India. The Catholic church was a formative influence that gave him his “first ideas of images and image-making” (Edwin... “...standing at the window, expressionless city man that you are, your suffering is far more complex than the obviously simple tortured expression of one crowned with thorns, and impaled with nails.” - F N SOUZA

F N Souza was born in 1924 into a devout Roman Catholic family in the then Portuguese colony of Goa, India. The Catholic church was a formative influence that gave him his “first ideas of images and image-making” (Edwin Mullins, Souza, Anthony Blond Ltd., London, 1962, p. 14) and he produced several works based on religious themes-including the crucifixion of Christ, the Pope, saints, and members of the clergy-throughout his career. He was drawn to the spectacle and ceremony of the church rather than its spiritual ideals, writing in his 1959 autobiography Words and Lines, “The Roman Catholic Church had a tremendous influence over me, not its dogmas but its grand architecture and the splendour of its services. The priest dressed in richly embroidered vestments, each of his garments from the biretta to the chasuble symbolising the accoutrement of Christ’s passion. The wooden saints painted with gold and bright colours staring vacantly out of their niches...And 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.” (F N Souza, Words and Lines, London: Villiers Publications Ltd., 1959, p. 10)

The Church continued to have a hold on Souza, even as he became disillusioned with organised religion. He came to view the Church and its representatives as hypocrites consumed by power and greed, a perspective that is often reflected in his oeuvre. Writes Dr Richard Taylor, “Souza’s Catholic upbringing meant that he was always a religious painter and his Goan, Indian background, together with his own artistic development meant that he was always a full-blooded pain painter, producing “rather bloody crucifixions.”” (Dr Richard Taylor, Jesus in Indian Paintings, Bangalore: The Christian Literature Society, Madras for the Christian Institute for the Study of Religion and Society, 1975)

The present lot depicts the Pieta`, an image of the Virgin Mary cradling the lifeless body of her son Jesus Christ after his crucifixion and Descent from the Cross. This theme is common in European art, with its most famous examples being Michelangelo’s marble sculpture La Pieta`, 1498 - 99 and Pieta`, 1575 – 76, thought to be one of the last paintings by Italian master Titian, who Souza himself revered. Souza developed a great admiration for Old Masters such as Titian, Rembrandt, and Goya following frequent visits to the National Gallery in London where he lived between 1949 and 1967. While this 1987 canvas borrows from the works of different Renaissance artists, Souza’s Christ it is devoid of the sentimentality and the trappings of divinity prevalent in most Western Christian iconography. Titian, for instance, lends Christ an almost peaceful demeanour, his body appears illuminated and a halo of light surrounds both him and Mary who looks on compassionately. Souza’s Christ on the other hand is presented as a “suffering human being” like the thorny subject is, rather than the exalted Son of God; he still wears a crown of thorns with the blood-stained markings from being nailed to the Cross clearly visible on his hands and feet.

The focus of the canvas remains squarely on its subjects, emphasising Souza’s commitment to figuration even when many of his modernist peers had turned to abstraction. There is scant detailing in the background though the colour palette evokes the stormy backdrop of Spanish Renaissance master El Greco’s The Vision of Saint John, 1608 - 14. Commenting on his command of space and form the critic Geeta Kapur writes, “The space in Souza’s pictures is by and large a blank ground, somewhat cursorily prepared to receive a figure which remains from start to finish the prime, positive, and self-complete proposition.” (Geeta Kapur, “Francis Newton Souza: Devil in the Flesh,” Contemporary Indian Artists, Vikas Publishing House Pvt. Ltd., New Delhi, 1978, p. 36)

In Souza’s Pieta, Christ’s face is painted with the thick, rigid lines and stiffness of Romanesque art, which he first observed on a visit to the National Museum of Catalan in Barcelona in 1962 that proved revelatory. Art historian Yashodhara Dalmia remarks that this “particularly medieval form of Christianity, with its revengeful God, was likely to have found an affinity with Souza.” (Yashodhara Dalmia, “A Passion for the Human Figure,” The Making of Modern Indian Art, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2001, p. 98) The heavy black lines also hint at the leaded glass windows Souza refenced in his earlier works combined with the influence of French Expressionist Georges Rouault, whose work was also deeply shaped by his own Catholic faith and whom Souza greatly admired.

As Mullins says “Souza’s treatment of the figurative image is richly varied. Besides the violence, the eroticism and the satire, there is a religious quality about his work which is medieval in its simplicity and in its unsophisticated sense of wonder. Some of the most moving of Souza’s paintings are those which convey a spirit of awe in the presence of divine power… In his religious work there is a quality of fearlessness and terrible grandeur which even Rouault and Graham Sutherland have not equalled in this century.” (Mullins, p. 40)

Besides its religious connotations, the work also explores the more tender theme of mother and child. It is the enduring theme of suffering, the universal grief of all mothers who bear the inequity of living beyond the life of their beloved child. Souza was extremely close to his own mother Lilia Maria Antunes, who raised him as a single parent. After his elder sister died a year after he was born, he remained her only child for a decade. By his own admission, Souza had a somewhat oedipal attachment. Therefore, the significance of this work, painted in the year of his mother’s death (1987) at age 87, is of enormous magnitude, one of a deeply personal nature. It is as if he, Souza, died a thousand deaths of grief turning to depict this in the only way Souza the artist knew how: in paint, armed with the symbolic imagery impregnated into him as a child in Catholic Goa. In the story, ‘My Friend and I’ from Souza’s book Words and Lines (Souza, p. 25), the artist writes poignantly: “I’ve always had a curious feeling of an ancient guilt that I had inadvertently killed my father because he died so suddenly soon after my birth. My mother was like the mother of Oedipus; Spartan in shape. She was temperamentally unpredictable and very sophisticated…I used to watch her bathe herself...”

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