Osian's Auction Catalogue Indian Modern Contemporary Fine Arts | October 2018

75 Indian Modern Contemporary Fine Arts F. N. Souza b. 12 April 1924 – d. 28 March 2002 Priest with Sceptre Oil on board, 1957 16.7 x 13.7 in (42.5 x 34.7 cm) S/d ‘Souza 1957’ t.l. ` 3,000,000 – 4,500,000 $ 41,670 – 62,500 Provenance Property from the eminent Hyderabad-based art & artifacts Collection of Shri Moti Lal & Prem Lata Devi Agarwal; acquired from Pune-based Parsi collector during the early 1970s. Thereafter by descent inherited by Ramlal Prakash Agarwal in 1994. 27 A pioneer of a movement towards modernism and a founder of the Progressive Artists Group, Souza was a truly international artist. Souza joined the J. J. School of Art in 1940, mastered all academic norms, but got expelled for his patriotic stance. He left for London in 1949 and after a trying struggle, was shown in a group exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, then offered a one-man show at the newly opened Gallery One. This exhibition in 1955, coincided with the publication of his autobiographical piece, Nirvana of a Maggot in Encounter, edited by Stephen Spender. Almost overnight Souza shot into fame. A spate of exhibitions, reviews, interviews and sales followed, well known critics like Andrew Forge, Edward Mullins and George Butcher wrote for him in papers like the London Times, The Guardian, New Statesman and Studio International. ‘A ferocious satirist of western man and a draftsman of concentrated power’ says the Observer , June 2, 1957. David Sylvester rhapsodized in the New Statesman of December 1957, about “the brutal frankness with which (Souza’s) writings lay bare his heart, his stomach, his sex, with a self-conscious, not an innocent, absence of shame.” ‘Souza is an image-maker – like Rouault and Francis Bacon. His art lies in his power to strengthen the eye’s image of this world by distorting it, until it becomes merely the language by which his own mental images are expressed, and the common ground on which we may come to terms with them. For, although Souza is a figurative painter, nothing about his art is descriptive; there is no celebration of nature, no attempt to capture the effect of a sunset, no concern whatsoever with what is “particular” in life. Above all, there is nothing romantic about his paintings…. Souza is an Indian, yet to explain away his paintings in terms of an Indian tradition is to explain it away. He has lived in this country for 13 years, and before that was educated in a Bombay that was “more Victorian than Victorian,” as he describes it, and whose intelligentsia thought more highly of Royal Academy bluebell woods than their own mighty sculptures of Khajuraho. If one looks for the true roots of Souza’s art one must look towards Rouault and Picasso, and more particularly towards Spanish and Portuguese Byzantine imagery, which made a deep impression on him in the small Catholic enclave of Goa where he was brought up. Much of his art still retains the stiff, hieratic quality of Byzantine church imagery.’ Edwin Mullins rpt. in F.N.Souza Kumar Gallery ExC 1961. See Full Provenance note on p.112 Detailed Artist Biography osianama.com/artists/f-n-souza