Important Notice

"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" (Yashodhara Dalmia, The Making of Modern Indian Art: The Progressives, Oxford University Press, New Delhi, 2001, p. 92).

Like his long relationship with organized religion, Souza's encounter with erotica and the female form was a complex one that had a profound effect on his creative output. As a child,... "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" (Yashodhara Dalmia, The Making of Modern Indian Art: The Progressives, Oxford University Press, New Delhi, 2001, p. 92).

Like his long relationship with organized religion, Souza's encounter with erotica and the female form was a complex one that had a profound effect on his creative output. As a child, the artist watched his mother bathe through a hole in the bathroom door, drawing her nude form on the wall. Shortly after, he was expelled from his Jesuit high school for the 'pornographic' drawings he decorated its restrooms with. Undiscouraged by the adverse reactions his work drew, Souza continued to express his love and fear of sex, the original sin, through his art. From his early statuesque portraits of tribal women to later distorted images of women explicitly displaying their sexuality, Souza's powerful female nudes thus inspire both passion and dread.

The artist's treatment of the female nude and the erotic, however, varied immensely, particularly in his canvases from the early 1960s. Still, whether demure or unforgiving, iconic or grotesque, these majestic portraits, with their bold black outlines and thick brushstrokes, never fail to grab the viewer's attention.

The present lot, a full-length nude, was painted the same year that Edwin Mullins published his seminal monograph on the artist. Unabashedly conscious of her 'immodesty', it is likely that Souza intended for the subject of this portrait to subvert the norms and so-called morality of the Catholic Church and expose its inflexibility as well as the 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!" (as quoted in Ibid.).

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