Francis Newton Souza

(1924-2002)

Untitled (Head)

Footnotes

Provenance
Property from a private collection, New York.
Acquired from Aicon Gallery.

Francis Newton Souza's style was bold and unapologetic. He painted with a sense of urgency, often using thick impasto layers and vibrant colours to depicts his subjects. His subjects ranged from portraits and landscapes to religious and erotic themes. Souza's fascination with the human form was a recurring motif in his work, which he often rendered in an abstract and distorted manner, exploring themes of desire, sexuality and spirituality.

Souza maintained a relentless drive for experimentation throughout his career. His striking portraits from the 1950s are distinguished by bold cross-hatching lines. By the early 1960s, Souza pushed this further, distorting his subjects' faces into intricate, mutated forms, with the present lot serving as an outstanding example.

"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." - F.N. Souza, 1962.

"I started using more than two eyes, numerous eyes and fingers on my paintings and drawings of human figures when I realised what it meant to have the superfluous and so not need the necessary. Why should I be sparse and parsimonious when not only this world, but worlds in space are open to me? I have everything to use at my disposal." (F. N. Souza, quoted in Notes, F N SOUZA, exhibition catalogue, Gallery One, London, 1961, p. 1, originally from the artist's diary, 9 January, 1961.).

"Souza has given to art a great deal more than he has taken from it. His painting is intensely personal, to the point of being esoteric. To appreciate it, one has to participate in certain preoccupations and fears which make his visual distortions explicable and sympathetic... If he was creating monsters, probably no one would be troubled; but because his images are clearly intended to be human, one is compelled to ask why his faces have eyes high up in the forehead, or else scattered in profusion all over the face; and limbs that branch out like thistles. Souza's imagery is not a surrealist vision - a self-conscious aesthetic shock - so much as a spontaneous re-creation of the world as he has seen it, distilled in the mind by a host of private experiences and associations." (Edward Mullins, Souza, Anthony Blond Ltd, 1962, p.38-39).

"I have created a new kind of face... I have drawn the physiognomy way beyond Picasso, in completely new terms. And I am still a figurative painter... [Picasso] stumped them and the whole of the western world into shambles. When you examine the face, the morphology, I am the only artist who has taken it a step further." (F. N. Souza quoted in Y. Dalmia, 'A Passion for the Human Figure', The Making of Modern Indian Art: The Progressives, Oxford University Press, New Delhi, 2001, p. 94).