Osian's Auction Catalogue The Masterpieces Series | March 2010

98 54 F.n. S ouza (1924 – 2002) Still Life Pencil and ink on paper (pasted on board), 1958 S/d in English ‘Souza 58’ l.r. 15.8 x 13.1 in (40.2 x 33.7 cm) Provenance THE OSIAN’s COLLECTION INR 300,000 – 450,000 US$ 6,250 – 9,380 55 F.n. S ouza (1924 – 2002) Man with Glasses Pen and ink on mountboard, 1959 S/d in English ‘Souza 59’ t.r. 16.0 x 11.0 in (40.7 x 28.0 cm) Provenance THE OSIAN’s COLLECTION INR 600,000 – 900,000 US$ 12,500 – 18,750 “Francis Newton…is a fanatic lover of music - classical music, an ardent student of current art movements, and has been interested for some time in politics - left, of course. He has felt the misery of the downtrodden masses of India, under-nourished peasantry exploited by a small class of landowners and usurers. He sees the sordidness and disease of the Bombay slums so shameful for everybody who knows the other side of immense wealth and luxury. He has felt the political oppression in his home country, Goa, since years under a dictatorship naturally afraid of the nationalist movement beyond the frontier, and under a local hierarchy interested to maintain the status quo…No wonder that he thought it his duty to place art in the service of a propaganda to alter such deplorable conditions; no wonder he believed that this should be an art of the people, for the people. These pictures have been crude, brutal, sometimes consciously obscene, but the people were not interested… Francis has commented… ‘Producing works of art for a limited coterie is as bad as painting for the proletariat. I left the Communist Party because they told me to paint this way and that’”. – Hermann Goetz, rpt. in Marg Vol. 3.3 , 1949, pp.34-39. Exhibited and illustrated Revisualising India. Lalit Kala Academy, New Delhi, 2005. Illustrated in catalogue published by Osian’s – Connoisseurs of Art, p.70