Francis Newton Souza

(India, 1924-2002)

Untitled (Nightscape)

Footnotes

Provenance:
Private Collection, Dubai;
Sotheby's, The Indian Sale, 24 May 2007, Lot 45;
Private Collection, UK, acquired in the 1960s.

From the mid 50s Souza lived in the leafy London suburb of Hampstead. His townscapes of this early period were ordered and upright. A sudden shift takes place in the 1960s and Souza's townscapes become wild and structurally farcical. The innocuous North London town houses are depicted through a montage of perspectives. They are renderings of a dystopian world, frenzied and foreboding.

Souza's discusses his landscapes in an article in the Times of India in 1989:
'We can now look back and be surprised at how those of us from the Progressive Artists' Group, Raza, Gade and myself, completely broke away from the wishy-washy 19th century English watercolourists, an influence which prevailed in Bombay even in the 1940s, and came into our own individual styles; our landscapes were not only very different from those of British painters like to Turner and Constable, we were, although we were very modern, different from the French impressionists. We were bold and full of fire. Our landscapes were full of brilliant colours!'(F N Souza, Red Trees, Black Skies, The Times of India, 4 June 1989, p. 4)

'Souza's landscapes... seem to be driven by a cataclysmic force, which wreaks havoc. Most of these cityscapes following, at first, a simple rectilinear structure, which later, in the 1960s, gives way to an apocalyptic vision. The tumbling houses in their frenzied movement are also symbolic of all things falling apart, of the very root of things being shaken, of a world of the holocaust and thalidomide babies.'
(Y. Dalmia, The Making of Modern Art: The Progressives, Oxford, 2001, p. 93)

Critic Edwin Mullins states that Souza has 'succeeded in creating images which are entirely personal, yet recognizable at the same time. They are often distorted to the point of destruction - houses no more than lopsided cubes...but they never threaten to dissolve into formalized abstract shapes. The violence and speed with which they were executed keep these images, however distorted, in touch with the painter's vision of what they really are.' (E. Mullins, Souza, Anthony Blond Ltd., London, 1962, p. 37)

Dalmia suggests that the landscapes of this period are ominous and dark, and yet there is an optimism in these pieces. The conservative middle class of North London, governed by appearance and respectability, were at odd with the open hedonism of the 1960s, at least publicly. Souza defaces their façade, behind which they hide and removes the ultimate bastion of respectability. He does so with carefully executed lines in a seemingly wild fashion. The distorted houses are no longer smokescreens but raggedy and distorted like their inhabitants. Souza brings a sense of macabre black comedy to his work.