“The principles of true art is not to portray, but to evoke.”
— Jerzy Kosinski
Known for his eclectic art, Souza achieved world-wide acclaim as one of India’s first post-Independence modernist painters. A majority of his works embody Expressionism — an art form echoing emotions and feelings with distortion— and influences of British Neo-romanticism — works projecting nostalgia and fantasy. He was also greatly inspired by the kaleidoscopic Indian folk art.
Born in Portuguese Goa in 1924, into a devout Roman Catholic family, Francisco Victor Newton de Souza spent his formative years in Goa before shifting to Bombay with his mother Lilia in 1929. At 16, he enrolled in the Sir J.J. School of Art. In 1945, his participation in Gandhi’s anti-British Quit India movement ruffled the feathers of the school administration leading to his expulsion. That day, was born “The Blue Lady” from the reckless abandon of an infuriated artist. Since then, his daily art became a ritual set in stone until the end.
Post the world war and India’s independence from the Imperial Rule, more and more of his art pieces strayed from traditions of fine art to the fringes of the radically changing society. They personified his innate emotions and unorthodox perspectives untrammelled by the era. In 1947, the artist co-founded the Progressive Artists Group along with fellow avant-garde artists Raza, Gaitonde, Ara, Husain and Bakre. This collective was an emblem of artistic individuality. It sought to interweave styles and forms of classical India with western techniques. Unbeknownst then, it tremendously shaped the art scene of post-Imperial India in her infancy.
When in Goa, he painted rural landscapes and the natives with broad strokes, and heavy outlining of prismatic colours.
Catholicism is a recurrent motif in his oeuvre of art works. As a child, he was mesmerised by the grandeur of the Church, the painstakingly meticulous routine of liturgies, the richly embroidered vestments of the priests, the lofty arches and gilded chantry of the churches. But he became highly critical and unsympathetic towards it later on in life. This enchantment mingled with renunciation of the Church spawned a plethora of paintings with biblical motifs.
In the manner of artists of the yore, the feminine figure has been a muse for many of his paintings and sketches. But they too were not spared of the artists vims and vigour. Sexually bold and deliberately distorted, they repulsed the refined and appalled the naïve. He painted lovers too and poignantly depicted the relations between them.
In his essay Nirvana of a Maggot, he described his little structure for his drawings and paintings: two parallel lines crosshatched on either side. A signature of his one can tell from thousands of his works.
Souza’s most infamous paintings were the distorted heads, an influence of Picasso; ugly, ill-proportioned heads with grotesque mutations, malformed freaks of nature, as if outcasts of hell itself. With his hand and finesse, he was able to carve his own path distinct from the great Picasso.
His paintings are a confluence of bold patterns, larger-than-life iconography, luminous mosaic, splodges and splashes of vibrant colour, regal tones of russet, emerald, amber, coral, plum, black ribboned borders, vivid washes, and thick swaths of luminous colour.
Many of his paintings are composed of luminescent mosaic works, which is reminiscent of traditional stained glass works and windows found in churches, capturing his fascination with the Church’s architecture.
Many of his still-life paintings display nostalgic trinkets of his simple Goan life.
Every piece of his artistic repertoire exudes raw emotion. They remain a visual chronicle of his life, a saga of an impassioned artist. His art is not elegant, far from it. It is personal, crude, and honest. Something not many can master. His expressive style is an acquired taste for many. And as Cesar A. Cruz rightly spells it, art is “To Comfort The Disturbed, and to Disturb the Comfortable.”
Panoplies of Souza’s works reside in several important museum collections, including the British Museum, Tate Gallery, Victoria and Albert Museum in London, Birmingham Museum of Art, The Hepworth Wakefield Art Gallery, Museum of Biblical Art in Texas, Haifa Museum in Israel, National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne, and the National Gallery of Modern Art in New Delhi. The collector base for his work extends across the globe with collectors from America, Europe, and East Asia, looking to Indian Modernists.
A self-described compulsive painter, Souza produced a deluge of landscapes, portraits, still-lifes in his lifetime. He was a man of great artistic integrity and a monument of contradictions and controversies. This avant-garde artist of his time lives on today through his legacy; his children and appreciably his art.
