Important Notice

Lot 58

 

Quick Zoom

“Souza is a painter with a powerful and strange personal vision. His paintings are neither primitive nor ‘cultured’. They either move you by their stark interpretation of the visual world, or they repel you…He is an image-maker and not an aesthete or a theorist. These are earth paintings, and their impact lies in the artist’s power to distort and strengthen the eye’s image of this world, and to produce an effect almost shocking in its... “Souza is a painter with a powerful and strange personal vision. His paintings are neither primitive nor ‘cultured’. They either move you by their stark interpretation of the visual world, or they repel you…He is an image-maker and not an aesthete or a theorist. These are earth paintings, and their impact lies in the artist’s power to distort and strengthen the eye’s image of this world, and to produce an effect almost shocking in its intensity…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” (Edwin Mullins, Souza, Anthony Blond Ltd., London, 1962, p. 33, 40).

Famous for scorning Renaissance painters for portraying men and women like angels, and declaring that his paintings, unlike theirs, depicted men in all their immorality and decadence for the angels to see, Souza is renowned for his disfigured portraits and mangled heads. The present lot, a portrait of a priest with a pockmarked face and multiple eyes, reflects the artist’s compulsion to expose pretense, as well as his own rocky relationship with the Roman Catholic Church. As Geeta Kapur notes, “The recurring portraits of priests, prophets, cardinals, and Popes are…to be taken literally for what they are but also symbolically as representatives of institutions and authority, only more treacherous in that they claim divine sanction…It is this double connotation of fact and symbol and his interlocked feelings of secret fascination and objective disgust which make Souza’s handling of religious figures so unique” (Geeta Kapur, Contemporary Indian Artists, Vikas Publishing House, New Delhi, 1978, p. 20).

As Souza himself once sardonically wrote, “It takes a lot of money to serve the Heavenly Father with vestments on, and an earthly father is needed to take care of it” (“Nirvana of a Maggot”, Encounter, London, Issue 17, February 1955).

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