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Lot 23

 

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F N Souza’s ‘Heads’ from the 1950s and early 1960s are among his best-known figurative works. Produced in various media, including pen and ink, acrylic, and oil, these portraits reflect the artist’s contemplation on human nature and its depravities, society, and the hypocrisy of religion. “Figurative art presents no problems for Souza because he has succeeded in creating images which are entirely personal, yet recognisable at the same time. They... F N Souza’s ‘Heads’ from the 1950s and early 1960s are among his best-known figurative works. Produced in various media, including pen and ink, acrylic, and oil, these portraits reflect the artist’s contemplation on human nature and its depravities, society, and the hypocrisy of religion. “Figurative art presents no problems for Souza because he has succeeded in creating images which are entirely personal, yet recognisable at the same time. They are often distorted to the point of destruction - houses no more than lopsided cubes, grotesque faces with eyes anywhere and in any number,” notes British art critic Edwin Mullins. (Edwin Mullins, Souza, London: Anthony Blond Ltd, 1962, pp. 36-37)

Souza’s experiments with heads and the human form began in the late 1940s and underwent a transformation in style over the years. They are indicative of the disillusionment he felt when he first moved to London in 1949 and battled poverty and uncertainty as he tried to break into the city’s art scene. His early iterations are distinguished by “thick, bounding lines” (Yashodhara Dalmia, “A Passion for the Human Figure,” The Making of Modern Indian Art, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2001, p. 80) and densely cross-hatched surfaces. In the 1955 portrait series, Six Gentlemen of our Times, “the soulless eyes are placed on the forehead, the gnashing mouth is fully bared, and the face is a ridged, rocky terrain bounded by lines and petrified by its own violence.” (Dalmia, pp. 82-83).

By the early 1960s, Souza’s ‘Heads’ sustained a change in visual language. “Instead of the parallel lines cross-hatched on either side, he now used a technique of scribbling, covering the initial image with a multitude of discs and loops and rings which serve to suggest eyes, teeth, hair, nails, ornaments, or, with minimum variation, embroidered motifs on the garments.” (Geeta Kapur, “Devil in the Flesh,” Contemporary Indian Artists, New Delhi: Vikas Publishing House Pvt Ltd, 1979, p. 28).

Souza’s ‘Heads’ can be compared to his contemporary Francis Bacon’s portraits for the similarity in their disfiguration of the face and exploration of the grotesque. Aziz Kurtha remarks, “It is well known that both Bacon and Souza held the Russian painter Chaim Soutine, who lived in Paris, in high esteem and they both followed Soutine’s exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1950. Even a casual observer could see Souza’s debt to Soutine as well as Rouault, especially in the figures drawn with heavy lines and exaggeratedly distorted human figures.” (Aziz Kurtha, Francis Newton Souza: Bridging Western and Indian Modern Art, Ahmedabad: Mapin Publishing, 2006, p. 42)

The present lot was created in 1962, during the brief period of success that Souza experienced in London between 1957 and 1966. It features several hallmarks of his figurative work, including an elongated nose and small, round eyes perched high up on the head, defined by thick, black lines and ridged strokes of paint. “It is the line that is Souza’s most articulate element and he uses it with great agility to encase the form. It is a sharp, clear, virile boundary that separates negative space from positive space and by its sheer virtuosity delineates the object.” (Dalmia, p. 93)

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