Important Notice

The subject of La Place, Town Square, 1955, is rather traditional - a typical French town with rustic buildings and a well. However Souza’s execution of the composition is both typically modern and aggressive. His use of flat bold areas of colour, akin to the post-impressionists and the Fauves before him, gives the painting not only a distinctive depth but also movement.

Souza creates an atmosphere that is desolate, yet expectant.... The subject of La Place, Town Square, 1955, is rather traditional - a typical French town with rustic buildings and a well. However Souza’s execution of the composition is both typically modern and aggressive. His use of flat bold areas of colour, akin to the post-impressionists and the Fauves before him, gives the painting not only a distinctive depth but also movement.

Souza creates an atmosphere that is desolate, yet expectant. This duality mirrors the artist’s initial experiences as a poor migrant struggling to make his mark in London. It was only in 1955, they year in which the present lot was painted, that the artist finally managed to break into the city’s artistic and literary circles.

Here, a barren tree with spines for leaves shares the foreground with a couple of uninviting, windowless houses. Behind them, a dark and dilapidated church–like structure looms menacingly on a hill, cold and unwelcoming, reflecting perhaps the artist’s negative opinion of organized religion. All the elements of this bleak townscape, such as the clear horizon, are demarcated by Souza’s thick black line, a hallmark of his work across all genres in the 1950s.

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