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Lot 32

 

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In 1955, following a prolonged period of struggle and deprivation, when Souza was striving to make a name for himself critically and commercially in London, the artist finally broke into the city's art scene with his first solo exhibition at Victor Musgrave's Gallery One, then a small space on Litchfield Street. In addition, Souza's autobiographical essay about Goa, "Nirvana of a Maggot", had just been published in the journal Encounter, edited... In 1955, following a prolonged period of struggle and deprivation, when Souza was striving to make a name for himself critically and commercially in London, the artist finally broke into the city's art scene with his first solo exhibition at Victor Musgrave's Gallery One, then a small space on Litchfield Street. In addition, Souza's autobiographical essay about Goa, "Nirvana of a Maggot", had just been published in the journal Encounter, edited by acclaimed poet Stephen Spender, and he was making waves in the literary world as well.

The present lot, painted the year after this breakthrough, is significant both in terms of its period and style. Though Souza employed his characteristic heavy impasto and the aggressive black lines inspired by the works of Rouault, Sutherland and Soutine in its creation, this painting lacks his usual violent disfiguration of its protagonist. Combining his iconic townscapes with his equally infamous 'heads' or portraits, it seems at first that, in the creation of this painting, Souza has forsaken the eroticism, satire and religious commentary that were his trademarks at the time, to portray a simple man about town, dressed in a suit and tie.

On closer inspection, however, Souza does seem to make an implicit comment on the society of the time through this painting. Here, the artist captures the circumscribed life of a town dweller, who, wearing a defeated expression, seems subsumed by the dreariness and drudgery of everyday life over which he can exercise no control. Souza evokes a number of emotions through his subject: compassion and anger as well as introspection. According to Edwin Mullins, who edited the first monograph on Souza in 1962, the artist's portraits like the present lot are, "…full of apparent contradictions: agony wit, pathos and satire, aggression and pity. Their impact is certain but few people are able to explain what has hit them" (Souza, Anthony Blond Ltd., London, 1962, p. 39).

Alternatively, this piece, titled The Student, may be read as a satirical comment on formal systems of education, with which Souza never had a pleasant experience. He was expelled first from his Jesuit high school in Bombay, thwarting his plans to become a Catholic priest, and then, five years later, from the Sir J. J. School of Art in the same city, cutting short his academic training as an artist. Formal education to Souza, then, was a constraint rather than a vehicle to realize ones aspirations, and, in that light, this work is perhaps a comment on the nature of the 'system', and its power to summarily mute passions and pigeon-hole lives.

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