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Lot 3

 

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The mid and late 1950s were a transformative period for F.N. Souza, witnessing his rise from near-destitution to artistic and literary fame, and the production of some of the artist's strongest works. Alongside his critically acclaimed portraits or 'heads', Souza also painted several landscapes, still lifes and female nudes during this period.

Speaking about his nudes, Yashodhara Dalmia notes, "Women as sex, life and nature are a... The mid and late 1950s were a transformative period for F.N. Souza, witnessing his rise from near-destitution to artistic and literary fame, and the production of some of the artist's strongest works. Alongside his critically acclaimed portraits or 'heads', Souza also painted several landscapes, still lifes and female nudes during this period.

Speaking about his nudes, Yashodhara Dalmia notes, "Women as sex, life and nature are a continuous strain in most of Souza's works and he invests them with age-old powers of fecundity." Unabashedly conscious of their immodesty, it is likely that Souza intended his nudes to defy and subvert the morality and norms of the Catholic Church to expose its inflexibility and the hypocrisy and self-righteousness of its representatives. As the artist explained in his 1992 article "Naked Women and Religion", published in Debonair magazine, "As a Roman Catholic youth, born in Goa, I was familiar with priests bellowing sermons from pulpits against 'sex' and 'immodesty' particularly addressed to women, making them stricken with guilt. The Catholic men stood cocky in their suits and ties agreeing with the priests, lusting for naked women inwardly. Hypocrites!" (The Making of Modern Indian Art: The Progressives, Oxford University Press, New Delhi, 2001, p. 92)

Although it always defied convention, Souza's treatment of the nude and the erotic was greatly varied. Some of his women were rendered as dark and disfigured goddesses, lashing out with claws and fangs. Others, with their legs unnervingly splayed out, put their hyper-sexuality on flamboyant display, and still others were graceful and reticent, seeming full of innocence. This variance mirrored the artist's multiple sources of inspiration, which included the voluptuous forms of ancient Indian temple art, the early works of Gauguin and Picasso, and the perspective and stance of Spanish Romanesque portraits.

The present lot is one from a small number of monochromatic nudes in tones of grey that the artist painted in 1958-59. Despite the vivid background that the subject stands against, and her voluptuous curves and decorative neckpiece, her grey flesh communicates the dystopian and disturbing vision that informed Souza's work at the time. Speaking about this choice of palette, Souza noted, "In the 1950s and 60s there arose a great fear that the world was on the brink of nuclear war. It would be the ultimate war; to say Goodbye Earth...The acme of all human knowledge has resulted in the making of the bomb...It's all wrong and will end in ashes. That is why my painting is in grey" (as quoted in Aziz Kurtha, Francis Newton Souza: Bridging Western and Indian Modern Art, Mapin Publishing Pvt. Ltd., Ahmedabad, 2006, p. 143).

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