5 min readApr 21, 2024 05:10 AM IST
First published on: Apr 21, 2024 at 05:10 AM IST
Even when he was growing up in Portuguese Goa, he flayed hypocrisy and corruption in his paintings. Born into a Roman Catholic family, Francis Newton Souza (1945-2002), though, struck by the splendour and colour of the church, also reviled the suppressive modes of the clergy and their practices. His earliest paintings had distorted forms which brought out the canker of the soul as it were of the priestly classes and indeed of religion itself. Far from the “blond, operatic Christs and flaxen-haired shy Virgins”, which as a child he had been encouraged to imitate at the Jesuit school in Bombay where he had studied and was later expelled, Souza preferred fractured and fragmented images that revealed the inner workings of the self.
In the birth centenary year of the artist, a large body of his works curated by me — which were on display at Lalit Kala Akademi and Dhoomimal Gallery — reveal the brutal honesty with which the artist confronted evil, that of his own and of others. As he stated, “It is the serpent in the grass that is really fascinating. Glistening, jewelled, writhing in the green grass… treacherous like Satan yet beautiful like Him.”
If Souza’s paintings had been confined to the clergy and Christ, it would have had a limited effect. But he impacted these forms with grating facial features of the rich and the powerful and revealed their inherent manipulation and corruption. He had the opportunity to watch them at close quarters in post-war London, where he lived from 1949 onwards. In works like Six Gentlemen of Our Times (1955), for instance, we see the artist’s powerful heads made with ink and paper to provide a visceral jolt with their malevolent features, revealing the simmering evil underneath. It was this gallery of rogues which spoke out blatantly about man’s inhumanity to man — not from the trenches of war but at the very doorstep of existence.
Souza constructed grotesque faces, with soulless eyes on foreheads, gnashing mouths fully bared, the face a ridged, rocky terrain bounded by lines and petrified by its own violence. One marvels at the sheer simplicity of means by which this extraordinarily mobile visage is constructed with dexterous cross-hatched strokes, like harpooning spears. The bristling effect he created with this, replaced shading and at its most frenzied pace, formed the main characteristic of the form. The artist said, “I have not only dehumanised man into two lines cross-hatched on either side, but I have also reduced the cosmos to a dot.”
While he exposed the decadence of the upper classes, it is to his credit that he did not spare himself. A self-portrait from this period has the artist’s image pierced with hatchings, with glittering, malevolent teeth. These ghoulish faces, which aroused revulsion, also exposed the subterranean strata of existence. As he said, “Renaissance painters painted men and women making them look like angels… I paint for angels, to show them what men and women really look like.”
Souza was quite unequivocal about his preference for women. He was often reviled for his nude women with their increasingly pendulous breasts. His largely promiscuous lifestyle, however, belied his belief in the strength and independence of women. He felt that women were inherently sexual beings and that this had been repressed under colonial rule. Many of his works reveal the influence of the sublime and erotic art of Khajuraho which had made him create his Mithuna couples where the men and women are acutely aware of each other, and fully sexual.
Souza’s landscapes always had toppling houses which are far removed from conventional studies. Yet these apocalyptic structures, torn asunder as it were, also revealed the surrounding chaos, not just in a post-war world but of man’s inhumanity to man.
When the artist shifted to New York in 1967 with his American wife, who was his third partner, he did not do so well. The manifestation of grotesque forms went largely unrecognised in the Abstract Expressionist style which had swept the country. But Souza was accustomed to a down-to-earth existence and continued to work with a furious energy, and his work of flaying established norms continued unhindered. One can, therefore, only revel in his years of exposing the underbelly of existence and his unextinguished desire to face the truth squarely so that men and women can lead more humane lives.
The writer is an art historian and independent curator based in Delhi
FN Souza’s East West Encounter (1984) (Courtesy: Dhoomimal Gallery) 
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