Dom Martin on F.N. Sousa
Theodore Mesquita on F.N. Sousa
Edwin Mullins on F.N. Sousa
Joel D'Souza & Alexyz on FN Souza
Dom Martin on F.N. Sousa
The risk of entering existence is that there is no coming out of it alive. Once enmeshed in existence, we find ourselves harnessed to the yoke of survival and plowing relentlessly through the fields of convention. Fear, diligence and piety keep us on course and orient us to conformity. Materialism, valor and the mythical, allow us to transgress and hopefully establish our place in time's hierarchy.
Francis Newton Souza's myth began before he even took the first existential gulp of air. According to him, he was painting murals in his mother's womb. Interestingly enough, this feat was earlier eclipsed by Salvador Dali, who reputedly began the tradition of decorating the maternal cavern. Such foetal prowess certainly defies the natural, overlaps the supernatural, and leads the rest of us to seriously probe the anonymity of our own foetal endeavors!
Born in the village of Saligao on April 12, 1924, Souza's coming was without any celestial signs or manifestations. The loss of his father at a tender age and a personal bout with smallpox, virtually obliterated the Catholic seal of faith with which he was imprinted at the baptismal font. Disillusioned with the significance of Heaven versus the painful realities of the present, he vowed to go about life his own way. He was no longer going to wait in line for a piece of pie in the sky. Whatever it took, he was going to aspire for the whole pie, and that too, here and now!
For Souza, reality was merely an infrastructure that could be broken down - and which one needed to hastily break down - in order to accommodate one's insurmountable needs and aspirations. In that context, he was a gun-toting maverick, gunning down customs and dogmas with his rhetorical brush and pen. At other times, he would transfigure himself into a bulldozer, leveling down friends, relatives, foes and anything else that stood between him and his next landmark.
An avid reader, his mind became a sleepless foundry, churning information into thoughts, and thoughts into diatribes. He loathed the smug banality of the bourgeois, took pungent delight in exposing the vulnerable traits of human reliance on faith and hypocrisy, but was quick to self-absolution when he found himself loitering about in some of these very same banalities.
John Berger, a noted art critic said of Souza: "He straddles many traditions, but serves none." Art collector Max Sequiera's summation was even more concise: "A cartoonist in oil". In the 60's, Max Sequiera was the manager of the Roopa Art Gallery (now the Taj Art Gallery), and he was responsible for putting together Souza"s historic 1963 art show at the gallery in Bombay.
From autographing lavatory walls to going communist and getting discharged from the party for being a misfit, Souza was not at all coy about giving his personal credo a public altar. The good, the bad or the perverse, he indulged in them, with uneasing candor. In his earlier years, he fervently believed in hunting with the pack. But when the opportunity would arise, he had no qualms about abandoning the pack and going solo for the booty.
His lust for life was entrenched in several failed marriages and the rearing of progeny he remained alienated from. His pursuit of fame took him through many crossroads and continents. He was widely acclaimed for his earlier works, both at home and abroad. In the end, as with other mortals, his waning brush was an unmatched weapon against death's swinging scythe. He died in Mumbai on March 28, 2002, in the very city where he first sowed the seeds of his creativity and over the years watched them bloom and spread, some becoming incorporated in the garden of Indian art.
Unlike Picasso who spent his last years doodling, and Dali, who wound up signing blanks -- Souza in the end was surrounded by fakes . Word is about that the workshop for these fakes is situated in Goa! Perhaps subdued by age or wisdom, Souza failed to use the trademark of his fame and influence to send the Bin Ladins of the art world into exile and extinction.
At an interview in Goa - two months prior to his passing - Souza remarked to journalist Fred Noronha that he "wasn't amused by the fakes". He went on to state that in one house, he encountered a roomful of "Souza fakes", and the gullible owner of the art works was very "proud" of them"!
Whether Souza ever acquired and devoured the illusive pie in the sky, or shared it with others, will never be known. He left no glossy footage behind. I recall him being somewhat damningly critical of his peers and contemporaries, and particularly bitter in his assessment that recognition in his instance made no qualms about dragging its sore feet -- or that it wasn't proportionate to his creative genius.
Souza was not alone in that bickering regard. As human beings, we aspire for success and recognition. As artists, we tend to take it one step further and aspire for immortality. The span from life to death can be as stretched with illusions as it can with facts and pitfalls. Ultimately, as always, the onus is upon death to sort truth from fiction, and thereafter, for time to immortalize that which is infinitely true. At the time when Pablo Picasso passed away, Souza was preemptive enough to assert: "I am the next greatest living artist after Picasso."
In retrospect, whoever Souza was and whatever he became, one will continue to hear his footsteps in the corridors of Modern Indian art. And for those who knew him personally, it isn't without the tacit admission that the likes of him are not a common occurrence in the grand scheme and theatrics of existence.
May
8, 2002
Top
Ablaze
he sets the trails of existence. He traverses the consciousness on which
we delve. In debt to the devil, his flesh and soul to none, as his thirst,
unuenched, contrives and convokes yet for more… " I want to
do everything: to make others suffer, to make myself suffer. I have no
desire to redeem myself or anybody else because Man is by his very nature
unredeemable, yet he hankers so desperately after redemption. I wanted
to hang myself on the cross with both my hands and feel nailed to it…….
To have arrows quivering in my neck like flies, while in the sweetness
of lovemaking ….. to repose in absolute bliss, the bliss of Ananda…."
This is Francis Newton Souza, the enfant terrible of Indian art. A profound
painter and also a proficient writer. A seed of the Goan soil, sprouted
from the village of Saligao, in the year 1924. Deprived of his father
three months after his birth, his destitute mother escaped to Bombay where,
with her knowledge of needlework, she earned enough to see her son through
school and college. Souza's relationship with his mother apparently loving.
She held dear to him, as he was such a rickety child with a running nose,
running ears and scared of every adult and every other child. She pledged
her son to the priesthood if he survived the dreadful attack of `smallpox'
that inflicted him. He escaped death and she added Francis to his name,
the patron saint of Goa. The bit about the priest was however not fulfilled.
Rather, he concorded an apprenticeship to the devil, bringing his mother
into the range of his ogling eyes. "I used to watch her bathe herself
through a hole I'd bored in the door… I drew her on the walls; prude
through I was rude. I can't see why, because so far as I can recollect,
I have even painted on the walls of her womb."
He expounds with effervescence, his posthumous relationship with his father,
which is evocative and imaginary. "I've always had a curious feeling
of an ancient guilt that I had inadvertently killed my father because
he dies soon after my birth".
Souza's ambivalence, generated by his thriving adrenaline, knows no bounds
- imaginative, irradiative, instigative and irruptive. It confines and
confounds us at every nook and corner of his activities and abilities,
invested with explosive energy. BIRTH OF A REBEL Souza was expelled from
school, as the Jesuit fathers did not appreciate his pornographic drawings
on the walls on the school lavatories. He was sixteen then, free, and
decided to become an artist. He joined the Jamshetjee Jeejebhoy School
of Art in 1940, where he was trained in the stolid tradition of decadent
and confused Eastern and Western insulated academicism. Nevertheless,
Souza mastered these academic norms and turned towards his fate of political
indoctrination. His rebellious nature and patriotic stance resulted in
his expulsion.
The occasion, a student's demonstration against the anti-national practices
of the English principal. Souza's process of politicisation led him quickly
to Marxism, and he joined the Communist Party of India. Here his works
expostulated the ethic of the spiritless society of his times, and ours,
as only the colour had changed and not the content. He depicted the exploiters
and the exploited, as retaliation to the humiliation he felt as a `native'
under the foreign yoke. He devised his figures according to class-types,
showed them in their environment and labeled them with appropriate titles.
The constraints of the Party and his instinctive abhorrence of a straitjacket
ideology led to his split from the Party. In 1947, Souza initiated the
Progressive Artist's Group (PAG) together with other upcoming painters
like Hussain, Raza, Ara, Gade and Bakre. With the formation of this group,
Souza set the stage for contemporary Indian art. In 1949 Souza left for
London. His early years in London were difficult and devoid. He earned
some money by occasional journalism and some intermittent commissions.
FLOATING ON FAME
In 1955, almost overnight, Souza shot into fame with his one-man show
at the newly opened Gallery One, overlapped with the publication of his
autobiographical piece Nirvana of a Maggot. John Berger, one of the world's
renowned art critics, a Marxists, was among the first to recognize Souza's
genius. He made a tentative interpretation of Souza's work, and admitted
his baffled admiration at the ease with which he 'straddles many traditions,
but serves none".
Souza was the first Indian artist to become something of a sensation in
the west. For that matter, even among his western contemporaries. He stood
pretty high on the ladder of success, like Graham Sutherland in England
and Bernard Buffet in France.
One of the factors that contributed to his tremendous success is his articulateness.
He often wrote, the introduction to his own catalogues, plus occasional
articles and essays. In all of these, he presented himself as the descendent
of the Devil and the Dadaists, an enfant terrible, all the more dangerous
because he belonged to the oppressed races. He managed, in his writing
to convert his racial malediction into angry genius, which he had contrived,
accumulated and dispensed into visual and verbal benefactions.
His early concerns, as his paintings indicate, were political idolization.
The works and social realist in behaviour, accommodating the virtues and
the morals of the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, a conjugation of the
Marxists jargon that prevailed then, for the desire to lead. But, as discovered
later, they were not very accurate and accessible to the sensibilities
present, as it was placed not rotating around the axis, but errant to
the self. As Souza expounds "I believe God is the First Cause in
a serial Universe, I believe Marxism is wrong because greed is the force
behind evolution, and therefore whoever is in charge of distributing the
`surplus value' will divert it"
As Souza's most enduring themes revolve around his Roman Catholic background and his antagonism towards it. He meditates subversively upon the various instances from the Old and new Testaments. He reflects and transcends all the narrative contours inherited, and evokes his relation and identification with the picture of Christ being an effigy of his existence through which he ponders. Reflecting the spirit of atheistic existentialism, he once wrote "... and you there on the top in a single furnished room, smoking, standing at the windown, expressionless city-man that you are, your suffering is far more complex than the obviously simple tortured expression of one crowned with thorns and imapled with nails.
In his painting The Last Supper of Christ, his expressionistic trait is powerfully inculcated, infused with questioning symbolism, as it envisages the constant unity that we try to maintain to achieve tranquillity, and the disdain that we suffer in our conscience. Souza's nudes are notorious for their earthiness and their uninhibited sexuality. The erotic imagery is powerfully stimulated, emphasizing the fertility and celebrating earthiness, crossing over into raw sensuality.
There is always a certain amount of `reading in' when one is trying to understand a complex painting. A work may offer clues and possibilities, but we must complete these half-truths with insights formed by our own pasts. If we are to make any sense of the image before us, we must try to reconcile it with our personal memoirs and experiences. But to be sensitive and competent `readers' we must recognize as well, that the power of the image lies also in its mystery, subjectively there is much we can see without understanding.
In looking at Souza's work the most important thing is not that we understand what the painting shows us, but what he shows us forces us in turn to see visions within ourselves, visions of our shared humanity. Souza's themes rides the waves of our human concerns, errant but able, containing and embrocating all the aspects of life, from his political affiliations to Christian overtones, from his Greek relatives to Hindu philosophy and to his current pet ideology the Redmond Theory' which stresses the continuity of infinity. Souza's contemplative energy is vitalized, revitalized and deposed with such and organised disorder that exposes and yet conceals the designs of our psyche. A paradox maintained, as he succeeds in his imperative - `The Soul'.
RETURN TO INDIAN ART SCENE
Souza has had momentous exhibitions all over the world: France, Japan, Germany, Sweden, Italy, Brazil, Argentina, USA, and Canada to mention but a few. He has had several retrospective shows and has been represented in important group shows based on themes as divergent as religious and erotic art. He has been bought up by Museums - from Haifa, Israel to Melbourne, Australia and also by the Tate, Gallery in London. In 1962, a London publisher brought out a book on him with a text by the English critic, Edward Mullin. Besides, he has several articles and publications to his credit, ranging from political issues to scientific inquests.
In 1967, Souza migrated to the USA from England, and settled in New York, where he presently resides, with occasional visits to India and of course, Goa. Francis Newton Souza, has expounded and facilitated the Indian Art scene which was long stagnating before he entered the arena. He gave the contemporary art movement in India the impetus-injecting vitality and energy, life to form, colour to mass, growth to dimension and blazed newer horizons embodied with wider and wilder perspectives.
His sensational character, errant behaviour and enigmatic, personality have all contributed to his credibility, as a major important artist of our time - un enfant terrible. Expanding and exploring our visions and faith, with his meticulous observations - dissecting ideologies and questioning conventions - he continues to inscribe, impress and inculcate his audiences, with those who venture to build-up a dialogue with his art.
Souza, who is 76 years old today, had for along time kept out of the mainstream of modern Indian Art. But this is no more true today, as this septuagenarian has broken this intermittent impasse and is back in the Indian art scene injecting his cerebral and livid imagination.
Souza features in many of the important art exhibitions happening in India today, conferring his inimitable vision of immense significance. Francis Newton Souza, though a resident of New York still maintains a link with Goa. His occasional visits to Goa do not receive much publicity. Yet his feelings for the land of his birth still persist. A stalwart in the international arena of art, his contribution to painting will be ingrained into the sands of time.
Edwin
Mullins on
F.N. Sousa
SOUZA is an image-maker- like Rouauft 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. "I
hate the smell of paint," Souza has written in his brilliant autobiographical
statement, WORD AND LINES; "Painting for me is not beautiful. It
is as ugly as a reptile. I attack it."
It
is not a critic's job to ask why an artist paints as he does. At the
same time, one cannot walk into a roomful of Souzas without at once
being forced to participate in certain passions and fears which make
these violent distortions of the visual world explicable and sympathetic.
Frequently these passions are not only violent but destructive, as though
each painting liberated the artist from a nightmare. His art is full
of strange perversities and contradictions, too. On a superficial level
this has led him to paint landscapes on cheap, tarty fabrics picked
up from the outsize department of a women s dress shop; or to paint
a portrait over a colour-photograph of the Canadian prairies or the
House of Parliament. But the contradictions go deeper than this; all
his most successful work seems to contain something of an emotional
clash - vulgarity and tenderness, or agony and wit, pathos and satire,
aggression and composure. They have some of the sheer inventiveness
of Picasso - specially Picasso's late graphic works - and the same unresolved
tumult.
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 thirteen
years, and before that was educated in a Bombay that was "more
Victorian than Victoria," 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 up 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.
All
the same it would be foolish not to recognise some debt to Indian miniatures,
bronzes and stone carvings; the emphasis on definitive line to trace
the twist and movement of the human body; the ritual treatment of the
erotic; and the intuitive understanding of a flat surface and what it
demands - these have their roots in classical Indian art. Yet no more
than Mario Marini has his roots in Donatello.
London 1962
FN Souza"YOU go when your time is up; not before nor after and once you go, you will not know that you existed. So what is the worry?" artist Namisha quotes the enfant terrible of Indian art, Francis Newton Souza.
Francis Newton Souza, or F N Souza, known in the world of art as the grandmaster of contemporary Indian art and having the credit of conceiving the idea of the founding the Progressive Artists Group, passed away in Mumbai on the night of 28 March, 2002, following a massive heart attack. He was 78. Souza was laid to rest in Sewri cemetery in Mumbai, in a quiet funeral on Mach 30. None of the family members or artists were present, except for a few gallery owners. A friend of Souza, Minal Vazirani of www.saffron.com, who helped organise the funeral service, said that many persons were informed about the funeral.
by alexyz"An artist can't become, he is born. The artist is in the foetus; the creative principle begins in the womb," Souza would say. He himself was born on April 12, 1924, in Saligao, where his father had shifted from his ancestral village of Assolna. Having lost his father while he was merely three months only, his mother had to make ends meet to bring him up.
Being a rebel he was easy to be expelled from institutions. It was around the age of sixteen that he decided to become an artist and joined the Sir JJ School of Art, Mumbai, to do a Diploma in Fine Arts, in 1940, but was shown the door for getting involved in the Quit India Movement. Earlier, the Jesuit priests at Xavier's in Bombay had done the same thing for using the lavatory walls to draw nudes. Souza would claim that he was blamed for somebody else's shoddy work, which he would only correct. In 1945, he became a member of the Communist Party of India (CPI) but had to walk out unable to stand the party constraints on his creative work.
Considered the pioneer of modern Indian art, knowledgeable Souza was the driving force behind the Progressive Art Movement, which he formed in 1948. The group lasted till 1956, with MF Husain, SH Raza, AH Ara, SA Gade and Hebbar as members. Husain considers Souza as "a mentor to a lot of us".
With funds raised by his friends and well wishers, Souza left for London in 1949. His one-man show at Gallery One and an autobiographical piece 'Nirvana of a Maggot' in "Encounter" magazine fetched him fame and fortune. By 1967, Souza shifted residence to New York, where he lived thereafter. Being a recluse, he hardly had any friends and believed that "Society should adapt to the artist, and not the other way around." Being sufficiently brash too, he must have rubbed many an acquaintance on the wrong side. Rather a bit too arrogantly, soon after the death of Pablo Picasso, considered the artist of the century, he said with conviction "now that Picasso is dead, I am the greatest".
He was definitely married thrice, his first wife being a Goan from Margao, the second a filmstar from Chekoslavakia and the third one a 17-year-old Britisher while he was 40. Not much is known about his family because none of them appeared for his funeral.
His early work appears to be influenced by Western Art as well as Indian modernist traditions. Souza paintings are peopled with erotic female nudes, landscapes and Christian themes. Souza's creative work revolves largely around his Roman Catholic background as well as his hostility towards it. Souza seems to have been forever searching for novelty.
Souza abhorred convention and this element figured prominently in his unrestrained and defiant brush as it recreating his own commandments for a perfect civilization and enlightened art.
His pen was equally potent. He penned several articles and publications which dealt with diverse subjects and included political issues and scientific inquests. He won the Guggenheim International Award in 1958. Writing about himself, he goes into the sequence of death, creation, endeavor, failure, alcoholism and sobriety.
His thinking was a medley of diverse influences: the folk art of native Goa, the upbeat stance of the Catholic church, the grandiose portraiture of Renaissance Europe and the landscape art of the 18th and 19th century. He kept track of the writings of Einstein, Darwin and Hawking, and mixed science and art to create canvases peopled with largely disturbing, powerful images.
Souza was an international figure where art was concerned and displayed his work at exhibitions in France, Japan, Germany, Sweden, Italy, Brazil, Argentina, USA, Canada and India. He had been represented in important group shows featuring themes from religion to erotic art and his collection are found in famed museums, to mention a few: Israel to Australia to the Tate Gallery in London.