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Journalism of Courage
Already a pivotal figure in the Bombay art fraternity, Francis Newton Souza had gained a considerable following by 1949, when his paintings were featured in an exhibition at the Art Society of India. Several visitors inquired about his work but not everyone was pleased. Within days his “obscene” artwork, including a nude self-portrait, were seized. Charged with obscenity, his studio was searched by the police looking for pornographic material, leaving him both furious and disdained.
No stranger to censorship or controversy, the incident reaffirmed Souza’s resolve to seek a more liberal audience. In July 1949, the 26-year-old boarded the SS Canton and set sail for London. “I have not much to say for the ten days that I have been here; but I have learnt that life in London is a luxurious commodity to sustain, and elements like water need pennies to be dropped in, and necessities like lavatories need pennies to be dropped in. I was very fortunate to have my good friend (Ebrahim) Alkazi with whom I could share my lodgings, otherwise I would get hopelessly into financial difficulties. So eagerness is a liability. I have learnt my bitter lessons. He, who never hopes, can never despair,” recalled Souza in a letter to fellow members of the Progressive Artists’ Group, dated August 17, 1949 (published in Geysers: Letters Between Sayed Haider Raza & his Artist-Friends; The Raza Foundation). Five years hence, when he presented his first solo in the city — in 1955 at Gallery One — it was a sell-out. It received as much acclaim as his autobiographical essay, Nirvana of a Maggot, published in Encounter magazine in the same year.
Often described as the enfant terrible of Indian art, who defied social and artistic conventions and strived to break new ground, the country, arguably, lost one of its most provocative modernists with his move to London. But, for Souza it was a journey into the unknown that opened a new world for him. “He was a man who didn’t just travel along as things happened, but someone who guided his own career, life and thinking. He was very well aware of himself,” recalls friend and artist Krishen Khanna. Uday Jain, director of Dhoomimal Gallery that marked his birth centenary on April 12 this year with an exhibition titled ‘Reminiscing Souza: An Iconoclastic Vision: Celebrating The Birth Centenary Of Francis Newton’ adds, “His work was different from his peers. Even when most artists, including him, were still trying to find their style, his lines and use of colour was as confident.”
Growing up in the idyllic village of Saligao in north Goa, Souza was a toddler when his father, English teacher José Victor Aniceto de Souza, passed away, followed by the demise of his older sister. Struggling with debt, his mother Lilia Maria Cecilia Antunes had just moved to Mumbai to work as a dressmaker when Souza was afflicted with a serious bout of smallpox. While his miraculous recovery led to the addition of Francis to his name, as gratitude to Goa’s patron saint St Francis, his mother also resolved for her son to lead the life of a Jesuit priest. What she didn’t know was how ill-suited Souza, with his unrestrained temperament and artistic inclinations, would be for such a life. She enrolled him at St Xavier’s High School but he was expelled two years later for sketching pornographic drawings in the lavatory. At 16, he joined the Sir JJ School of Art, from where, too, he was suspended after he participated in the Quit India Movement. Back home, in a fit of rage, he painted what later became one of his seminal works — The Blue Lady — an azure nude painted with a palette knife. Speaking of his disappointment with formal education, in the catalogue of his exhibition at the Bombay Art Society in 1948, Souza wrote: “I underwent an abortive art training. The teachers were incompetent… Shelley was expelled once, Van Gogh was expelled once… I was expelled twice. Recalcitrant boys like me had to be dismissed by principals and directors of educational institutions who instinctively feared we would topple their apple-carts.”
Soon, however, he was to find his clique in the bustling city of Bombay, among artists, writers and poets feverishly engaged in discovering an avant-garde modernist aesthetic for independent India. Individual ambition found collective meaning under the umbrella of the Progressive Artists’ Group that took birth months after India attained freedom. With Souza as secretary, the disparate group comprised founding members SH Raza, HA Gade, KH Ara, Sadanand Bakre and MF Husain. “We came together through mysterious chemical reactions. We would be talking all night. We used to go and sit at Backbay and talk and talk… about what art should be and how it should be done. Without seeing any model of art… without doing it we first formulated it in speech,” said Souza, in The Patriot magazine in 1984.
While each of the artists seemed to have incorporated new learnings into their work, the shift in Souza included the fading away of his Communist leanings and the prominence of strong lines and brushstrokes. By the early ’40s and ’50s, some of the diverse influences that shaped his art had begun to surface, from south Indian bronzes and the temple sculptures of Khajuraho to European modernism. The landscapes that he had admired in his native Goa had taken the form of lush horizons on his canvases, as did the visual culture of the Catholic Church and stories of tortured saints narrated by his grandmother that surfaced as religious iconographies. The distorted figures and grotesque heads were to remain an eternal part of his oeuvre across mediums and metaphors.
The initial years in Europe were rife with worries. In a country still recovering from the ravages of World War II, Souza’s wife Maria was initially the breadwinner. He was getting acquainted to Western art through museums and galleries where he encountered works of Rembrandt, Caravaggio and Pablo Picasso. Though occasional earnings came through writings and commissions, including murals for the Indian Students’ Bureau on West Cromwell Road in 1950 through Indian High Commissioner VK Krishna Menon, it was only with his first solo in 1955 that he began to gain recognition. The four years of regular monthly stipend from American collector Harold Kovner, 1956 onward, assured sustenance. The following decade saw him produce some of his most revered works, including the monochromatic “Black on Black” paintings, and the 1959 collection of writings and drawings, Words & Lines, that won him respect in literary circles. The 1955 canvas Birth — with a pregnant nude, the self in a priest’s tunic and the cityscape — set a world record in 2008 for the most expensive Indian painting ever sold, priced at US$2.5 million. In 2015, Birth was resold for US$4.8 million.
Even as Souza and his art travelled the world — including representing Britain at the 1958 Guggenheim International Award, and Italy in 1960 on a scholarship — his domestic life was in turmoil. He became an alcoholic to a point that it began to interfere with his ability to work but finally decided to get help in 1960. He also had a turbulent affair with Jewish actress Liselotte Kristian, with whom he had three daughters. When that relationship ended, he married 17-year-old British-American Barbara Zinkant. The couple travelled to India and following their return, shifted base to New York in 1967. An emulation of his state of mind, his visits to the California countryside led to cheerful landscapes in exuberant hues. His experiments during the period included ‘chemical paintings’ that involved painting or drawing on pages torn from magazines, catalogues and printed photographs using chemicals to dissolve the printer’s ink. “He was also an excellent writer and a voracious reader of art history, poetry and philosophy, which reflected in his work,” says RN Singh, founder, Progressive Art Gallery. He feels that the artist was rather misunderstood as brash and egocentric, “He might have been unpredictable but he was also very generous… His works were often personal and influenced by his life experiences. For instance, his sensual female nudes might be seen as overly explicit but they did represent both his love for the female form as also his own fractured relationships and multiple affairs. It was also somewhat his rebellion against the conventional standards of beauty, to heal his complex of having pox scars on his face that he felt repulsed women.”
Khanna recalls how the incorrigible Souza was also very demanding in his relationships. He remembers a visit to London when he was keen to purchase a Souza nude but didn’t have the asking price of Rs 1600. “I asked if he would make an adjustment for me on price, but he just smiled and said that at Rs 1600 it would become my privilege to own it,” shares Khanna. As friends, they were often critical of each other. “I had once anonymously written an article opposing something he had written. I had commented that he was a little too fond of himself, which can be a dangerous thing for any writer, painter or musician… He read it and chuckled. He thought (lawyer and art connoisseur) Karl Khandalavala had written it, but when I told him it was me, he laughed and laughed. He didn’t think that if I wasn’t an art critic per se, I couldn’t have critical ideas.”
Despite his global fame, few exhibitions of his works were held in India until the turn of the century. “A large part of the Indian market only took notice of Souza after the auction market became strong. Also, as opposed to international buyers, who revered his nudes and figurative works, the Indian market was or is more keen on landscapes. His diabolical heads remain the most universally loved works,” shares Jain. He adds, “My father, Ravi Jain, had Souza’s first exhibition in Dhoomimal in 1965, and sold only one work. When Souza asked him why — since he was already considered an important artist in Europe, alongside the likes of Francis Bacon and Pablo Picasso — my father said India will take time to recognise your genius. When we had another exhibition of his works from the ’40s in 1975, it was attended by then PM Indira Gandhi and also important collectors, including Masanori Fukuoka and Ebrahim Alkazi. When we showed his work at the Kala Mela in 1986, he even painted live and was a huge hit with students who gathered to take his autographs.”
Painting with absolute freedom, Souza’s art remained perplexing yet arresting, much like his own rebellion. An inveterate outsider, he had few friends with him when he passed away in Mumbai in 2002. Posthumously lauded for his modernism by Britain and India, Khanna notes how Souza truly believed that he was meant to be an artist. “He never said, ‘I am a great painter’, but he was one and behaved like it. He created a certain norm for painting and stood by what he did,” adds Khanna.
