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Lot 46

 

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Following a brief stay in Italy in 1960 on an Italian Government scholarship, and visits to Spain and other European nations the following year, Souza painted a series of townscapes quite unlike the bleak visions of London and its surroundings that dominated his work during the early and mid 1950s. These scenes were not foreboding or uninviting; their structures expressed dynamism and power, sometimes almost cataclysmic, rather than gloom and... Following a brief stay in Italy in 1960 on an Italian Government scholarship, and visits to Spain and other European nations the following year, Souza painted a series of townscapes quite unlike the bleak visions of London and its surroundings that dominated his work during the early and mid 1950s. These scenes were not foreboding or uninviting; their structures expressed dynamism and power, sometimes almost cataclysmic, rather than gloom and lethargy.

Among these landscapes is the present lot, a 1961 painting of the town of Valldemossa in Majorca, Spain. The most recognisable structure in the town and in this painting is the 14th century Real Cartuja or Royal Charterhouse with its distinctive steeple. Originally a Carthusian monastery, this historic structure has served as inspiration for many artists, musicians and writers before Souza, including the composer Frederic Chopin.

The present townscape also represents a brief period of experimentation in Souza's oeuvre, when the artist painted on canvas instead of board, and first used acrylics or polyvinyl acetate emulsion, a thin glue-like binder for artist's pigments. As a result, the application of colour here is finer than the thick oil impasto that characterized his work in the 1950s, and gives the surface an almost translucent appearance. Another notable example from this period is the 1961 painting 'Two Saints in a Landscape', the first work in this medium acquired by the Tate Gallery for their permanent collection.

However, like most of Souza's work, each element in this horizontal composition - the clear bands of blue sky, forested hills, pale structures and baked earth - is given shape and form by the confident black line that the artist used to delineate them. Speaking about the power of Souza's line, Geeta Kapur notes that, "Of the pictorial elements it is decidedly the line which is the most developed part of Souza's vocabulary…His paintings are really drawn in paint, the line predominating over all other elements and serving to outline, encase and define an image; serving also to provide tonal variations… and to give the painting a structural and surface unity" ("Devil in the Flesh", Contemporary Indian Artists, Vikas Publishing House Pvt. Ltd., New Delhi, 1978, p. 56, 57).

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