Important Notice

Lot 29

 

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The mid-1950s were a transformative period for F.N. Souza. Given a grant to work and study in Paris in 1952, the artist established several important connections with Western European gallerists and dealers. Although Paris wasn’t “the genuine Mecca for painters” that Souza imagined, it was there that he met Raymond Creuze and Iris Clert, who would significantly propel his artistic career over the next several years.

It was also... The mid-1950s were a transformative period for F.N. Souza. Given a grant to work and study in Paris in 1952, the artist established several important connections with Western European gallerists and dealers. Although Paris wasn’t “the genuine Mecca for painters” that Souza imagined, it was there that he met Raymond Creuze and Iris Clert, who would significantly propel his artistic career over the next several years.

It was also in Paris that Souza met Harold Kovner in 1956, his first and, perhaps, his most important patron. “Kovner, a wealthy American, had come over from New York to find a young artist whom he could take up. He saw Iris Clert, who showed him all her pet abstracts, artist by artist. Kovner remained unimpressed. Finally, and with some reluctance, she let him downstairs and produced several paintings by Souza. Kovner jumped. Within 24 hours he had met Souza, given him money, taken away some pictures, made arrangements for the future, and was flying back to New York. The arrangement was a perfectly simple one. Souza was to keep him supplied with pictures every few months – entirely of the artist’s choosing – and in return Kovner would keep him supplied with money. It lasted four years, and Mr. Kovner is now the owner of nearly 200 Souzas. It was a case of patronage of the most simple and practical kind, and needless to say it enabled Souza to live without acute financial worries for the first time in his life” (Edwin Mullins, Souza, Anthony Blond Ltd., London, 1962, p. 26).

The present lot, originally from the Kovner collection, is one of Souza’s more violent portraits of emperors. Offering insight into his reading of human society, these paintings unmasked what Souza saw as the hypocrisy of men of wealth and power, exposing their dark ‘soullessness’. “A growing skill in expressing the grotesque allowed Souza to dwell on the cunning manipulation by the rich, thereby extending his liturgy of the decadent…The denouement of the upper classes, with their underlying violence masked by vestments of polite behaviour, is complete…Deploying his faces, as it were, to expose the larger hypocrisy of nations…the essential condition of human beings, of men without redemption” (Yashodhara Dalmia, The Making of Modern Indian Art: The Progressives, Oxford University Press, New Delhi, 2001, p. 82-84).

Drawing from various sources including traditional African masks and the works of Cubist painters like Braque and Picasso, the artist darkens and disfigures the monarch’s face here, almost twisting it in a knot to reflect the excesses of those in positions of authority. Marked with Souza’s characteristic hatched lines and brow-set vacant eyes, the depravity of this figure overrides any regal associations. Completing the artist’s piercing critique is his replacement of the emperor’s opulent crown and robe with ones that appear to be made of dry, brown twigs, underscoring the base instincts they usually camouflage.

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