8 March, 2010
Saffronart’s Spring auction has 11 Souzas that art lovers can chase the gavel for. But there are two works that stand out like jewels. The first is a Gothic Head estimated at a hefty estimate of $150,000-200,000/Rs 67,50,000-90,00,000. The second is a mesmeric Night Landscape estimated at $75,000-$95,000/Rs 33,75,000-Rs 42,75,000.
Getting hold of Souza’s Heads is by no means easy. This work belongs to 1957, one of his best years. Souza’s series of Heads from the 1950s are probably his most important and well known figurative works. In addition to exploring the nuances of figuration, these portraits served as channels for the artist’s scathing social commentary, frequently centered on the dual issues of sex and religion, pleasure and suffering, which absorbed him all through his career. Offering insight into his personal life as well as his beliefs, they unmasked the hypocrisy of the clergy and the gentry, exposing their “soullessness” for all to see.
The one continuing theme Souza explores is the theme of hypocrisy and the Church, in so far as it symbolises absolute authority and camouflages with subtle cunning the hypocrisies of the elite. The recurring portraits of priests, prophets, cardinals, and Popes are therefore to be taken literally for what they are but also symbolically as representatives of institutions and authority, only more treacherous in that they claim divine sanction. It is this double connotation of fact and symbol and his interlocked feelings of secret fascination and objective disgust which make Souza’s handling of religious figures so unique. In this powerfully poignant painting, Souza offers his irreverent take on the portrait of a dignified man, executed in an austere palette and bordered by the artist’s thick line. With his elongated head, high-set eyes, tubular nose and half-hidden jaw, the subject here, probably an ordained member of the clergy, is robbed of all nobility and grandeur, save for the spare detailing around the neck of his tunic. Instead, Souza labels him “gothic”, a remnant of the medieval ages, representative of beliefs and systems that are outdated and duplicitous. What endures is the darkened palette and the brooding intensity.
The second work is done as a Western landscape,with an orchestration of midnight blue tonalities and a cubist rendition of a set of houses. Following a visit to Italy on an Italian government scholarship in 1960, Souza painted a series of townscapes quite unlike the bleak visions of London and its surroundings that dominated his work during the early and mid 1950s. These scenes were not uninviting; their structures, tumbling one over the other, expressed dynamism and power rather than gloom and lethargy.
The present lot, one of Souza’s more unusual landscapes from the period, is striking in both its nocturnal setting and its unconventional verticality.
Here, a rising and falling band of yellow houses cuts through the darkness of the night, separating the black-green land from the inky blue sky. Defined by Souza’s characteristically thick black outlines, the houses almost glow from the intensity with which they have been executed. Stacked precariously on top of each other, these structures seem to heave and sway in unison, the arches and windows of one barely discernable from the towers and roofs of another. One remembers a dark red toned townscape of New York, at the Kumar Gallery, Sunder Nagar, in the 90s which was selling for as little as Rs 30,000.
Of the pictorial elements it is decidedly the line which is the most developed part of Souza’s vocabulary. Whether it is ornamental or abrupt, lyrical or diabolic, critic Geeta Kapur said that Souza’s line is derived from Picasso; from Picasso’s unmatched virtuosity in delineating an object or figure with sheer element of line.
His paintings are really drawn in paint, the line predominating over all other elements and serving to outline, encase and define an image; serving also to provide tonal variations… and to give the painting a structural and surface unity. It will be rivetting to watch the rise and fall of the gavel at the Saffronart Spring Auction on March 10-11 this week.
Uma Nair
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