Important Notice

The female nude was an endless source of fascination for F N Souza and a subject he frequently returned to throughout his oeuvre. He lent his own distinctive style to this popular art historical archetype through works that explored a wide range of physiognomies, from voluptuous and sensual to grotesque and distorted. Like his religious themes, he used these figures to comment on societal norms, sexuality, and the corruption of... The female nude was an endless source of fascination for F N Souza and a subject he frequently returned to throughout his oeuvre. He lent his own distinctive style to this popular art historical archetype through works that explored a wide range of physiognomies, from voluptuous and sensual to grotesque and distorted. Like his religious themes, he used these figures to comment on societal norms, sexuality, and the corruption of humanity.

The present lot was painted in 1968, a year after Souza had left London for New York. The subject is a curvaceous nude woman holding a mirror, who occupies the centre of the canvas and is placed against an indistinct background of a grey, stormy sky and blue ocean. He revisited this trope in many of his paintings and drawings, having borrowed it from European masters such as Titian, whose works he had studied in libraries in the 1940s and later at museums and galleries in London.

As the title Californian Girl suggests, Souza takes the conventions associated with the nude in European art and gives it a playful modern spin. The protagonist of Titian’s Venus With a Mirror, circa 1555-a sensuous ode to the Roman goddess of beauty and love-turns into the quintessential sun-tanned, bleached blonde California girl that The Beach Boys famously sang of a few years earlier in their 1965 hit. Her skin however is noticeably darker than most Caucasians, likely a subtle commentary on the prejudice that Souza often encountered as an Indian man in London of the 1950s and 1960s and the irony of white skin sun worshipping to become tanned.

Explaining the symbolism of the mirror in European art, critic John Berger writes, “The mirror was often used as a symbol of the vanity of woman. The moralising, however, was mostly hypocritical... The real function of the mirror was otherwise. It was to make the woman connive in treating herself as, first and foremost, a sight.” (John Berger, Ways of Seeing, London: British Broadcasting Corporation and Penguin Books, 1972, pp. 48, 51)

Rather than vulnerability, there is a brazenness in her buxom form and its monumentality and iconic stance, features whose origins could be found closer to home. This Californian Girl is voluptuous and beyond golden brown, rising from the sea bold as brass. More a Sun God like the Colossus of Rhodes, rather than sun worshipper. Souza’s female nudes were greatly inspired by South Indian bronzes and the carvings of Khajurahao and Mathura, which he saw reproduced in books in his youth and in person at a 1948 exhibition of Indian antiquities and classical art at Rashtrapati Bhavan in Delhi. Though most apparent in his works of the late 1940s and 1950s, his nudes retained many of these qualities throughout his career. Remarks Edwin Mullins, “These are not really erotic paintings in the true sense, but variations on a conventional theme explored by European artists from Rubens and Boucher to Renoir and Modigliani. Souza brings to this European convention a manner more traditionally Indian than he uses with any other theme.” (Edwin Mullins, Souza, Anthony Blond Ltd., London, 1962, p. 43) It was these varied art historical influences, spanning East and West, which Souza brought to his work that led Berger to remark that he “...straddles several traditions but serves none.” (John Berger, “An Indian Painter,” New Statesman, 25 February 1955)

Besides his artistic preoccupations, the work also exemplifies Souza’s skilful draughtsmanship. He preserves a sense of elegance and grace by using a fluid, uninterrupted line in the “most intimate and spontaneous form of artistic expression.” (Aziz Kurtha, “Idiom and Expression,” Francis Newton Souza: Bridging Western and Indian Modern Art, Ahmedabad: Mapin Publishing, 2006, p. 98) In the artist’s words, “Drawing is the armature, the anatomy, the structure… Drawing for me is essential in order to build up the structure of my iconography.” (Artist quoted in Kurtha, p. 98)

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