“...to give pleasure has never been Souza’s aim, and he holds little respect for
other artists who set out to do so. He feels that a painter is rather like a furniture
manufacturer who possesses an inner compulsion to build the most uncomfortable
chairs he can, and then make people sit in them. Why, one may ask, this determination
to offend? Why never to please? The answer is, I think, that to Souza art is a form of
propaganda, a means of hypnotising others into accepting his view of what the world
is like. And because what he has to say is uncomfortable, he feels that his paintings
must initially cause discomfort or they have failed: they are sweetmeats. His mistrust
of sweetness is so extreme that it has led him to suspect most accepted criteria of what
good painting is, and to court individuality at any cost. ‘I now know what art is’, he
has written with disarming conceit: ‘art is what I do’.”
– Edwin Mullins, The Human and the Divine Predicament - New Paintings by F.N. SOUZA
Grosvenor Gallery, London, 1964, p4.
“...to give pleasure has never been Souza’s aim, and he holds little respect for
other artists who set out to do so. He feels that a painter is rather like a furniture
manufacturer who possesses an inner compulsion to build the most uncomfortable
chairs he can, and then make people sit in them. Why, one may ask, this determination
to offend? Why never to please? The answer is, I think, that to Souza art is a form of
propa