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Lot 88

 

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“Renaissance painters painted men and women making them look like angels…I paint for angels, to show them what men and women really look like” (as quoted in Edwin Mullins, Souza, Anthony Blond Ltd., London, 1962, p. 82).

Throughout his career, Souza remained compelled to draw and paint the human figure, in an effort to document both the beauty and depravity of his race. These portraits thus took on the mantle of sharp social... “Renaissance painters painted men and women making them look like angels…I paint for angels, to show them what men and women really look like” (as quoted in Edwin Mullins, Souza, Anthony Blond Ltd., London, 1962, p. 82).

Throughout his career, Souza remained compelled to draw and paint the human figure, in an effort to document both the beauty and depravity of his race. These portraits thus took on the mantle of sharp social commentary, frequently centered on the dual issues of sex and religion, pleasure and suffering, which absorbed the artist throughout his career. Torn between the beliefs he was brought up with and the hypocritical practices of individuals and institutions that clouded them, Souza cathartically communicated this schism to his viewers through his work, exposing the Janus-faced nature of those in positions of power.

Drawing from Spanish Romanesque portraiture, Catholic icons, and the works of artists like Soutine and Rouault that he encountered in London’s museums and galleries in the early 1950s, Souza fashioned an artistic vocabulary that could carry the biting wit and social commentary of his portraits from that period. Characterized by an icon-like confrontational frontality and clearly defined with thick black lines, his images of saints and suited men, representative of the fall of religion and society, are some of the artist’s most powerful works.

Several of these portraits depicted St. Sebastian, the martyr and patron saint of various causes ranging from archers and victims of the plague to bookbinders. The present lot, a portrait of Sebastian irreverently shorn of his decorum and sainthood, aptly sums up the oppositional forces that shaped Souza’s life and work. Although he was vociferously anti-religious, the artist remained obsessed with theological subjects. Here, in one of his most uncompassionate portraits, the artist illuminates the avarice and corruption of the pious rather than their supposed benevolence, and the way in which the notion of sainthood has been sullied by its representatives.

Speaking about a similar painting from 1955 Geeta Kapur notes, “There is a great deal of punning in these portraits and swift diabolic transformations from one known type to another. Mr. Sebastian (1955) takes after Saint Sebastian but wears a dark suit, and the arrows that pierced the innocent body of the Saint are here stuck into the man’s face and neck with a vengeance which, judging from his evil countenance, he seems to merit. Is it the Saint who is suspect in Souza’s eyes, or the suave gentleman?” (Geeta Kapur, “Devil in the Flesh”, Contemporary Indian Artists, Vikas Publishing House Pvt. Ltd., New Delhi, 1978, p. 47, 48).

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