JEHANGIR NICHOLSON ART FOUNDATION
Francis Newton Souza (1924-2002) was regarded as the enfant terrible of the nascent postcolonial Indian art scene of the 1950s and 1960s. This reputation was based on his incendiary personality and his ferocious paintings, peopled by savage saints, brutish capitalists, cyborg soldiers, and female figures depicted as both voluptuous and predatory. Following Souza’s dramatic self-portraiture in his 1959 text, ‘A Fragment of Autobiography’, it has been customary to trace the origins of his adversarial aggressiveness to childhood trauma. The critic W G Archer wrote in 1965, for instance, that Souza’s experience of Portuguese rule in the Goa of his formative years, his father’s early death and his scarring by a virulent attack of smallpox gave the artist “a sense of life as cruel, violent, and unjust. He was led to envy but also to scorn figures in authority, and his powerful father-figures – priests, elders, businessmen, patriarchs – have often a fantastic grandeur but, at the same time, features that are moronic in their senseless stupidity.”
In ‘F N Souza: The Power and the Glory’, we approach these Freudian generalisations in a more nuanced manner. We argue that Souza’s bitter critique of religious authority emerged from a highly specific political context: that of his opposition to the conservative, Eurocentric Catholicism into which he was socialised as a subject of the Estado da India, the Portuguese Empire in India. Despite living away from Goa – first in Bombay and later in London – Souza remained psychologically entangled with the Estado da India for the first four decades of his life, from his birth in the comunidade of Saligao in April 1924 to Goa’s annexation by the Republic of India in December 1961, an act New Delhi justified under the sign of ‘liberation’. For most of this period, the Portuguese Empire was controlled by the dictator Antonio de Oliveira Salazar, whose regime was symbiotically supported by conservative Catholic clerics.
This exhibition takes its title from the closing line of the Lord’s Prayer, “For Thine is the Kingdom, the power and the glory, forever and ever, amen.” It also riffs on the title of Graham Greene’s 1940 novel, The Power and the Glory, whose central character, an unnamed ‘whisky priest’, is torn between belief and carnality, heroism and weakness. At the core of this exhibition is the fraught relationship that Souza, himself a ‘whisky priest’, negotiated between dogma and dissent, organised religion and eccentric spirituality. This relationship is explored across an expanded field of exhibits, including a selection of Souza’s works from the Jehangir Nicholson Collection, a set of his ‘chemical works’ on loan from the Pundole Art Gallery Collection, and an ensemble of Indo-Lusitanian sacred images borrowed from the CSMVS.
Watch a special walkthrough by curator Ranjit Hoskote here.
Francis Newton Souza (1924-2002) was born in a Portuguese colony in Saligao, Goa. As a young child, his Catholic mother moved them to Bombay where he studied at St Xavier’s High School. There, he formed an interest in drawing and studying imported European prints. However, early on it became apparent that he was rather rebellious, later causing him to be regarded as the ‘enfant terrible’ of the emerging Indian art scene of the 1950s and 1960s. According to critic W. G. Archer in 1965, the premature death of his father, his experience of the Portuguese presence in Goa, and an attack of smallpox, gave Souza ‘a sense of life as cruel, violent, and unjust.’ These themes, as well as his issues with authority figures are present in his art throughout his career.
Souza studied at the J.J. School of Art but was expelled in 1945 for participating in left wing political activities, notably the Quit India Movement. He emerged as an artist-activist, and in 1947, co-founded the revolutionary Bombay Progressive Artists’ Group along with M.F. Husain, S.H. Raza, and others. Together, the PAG advocated a forceful modernism which Souza believed would go beyond the confines of nationalistic art.
Souza moved to London in 1949 for creative freedom and international recognition. After struggling for the first few years, he finally started to make his mark, and was one of the first post-independence Indian paintings to gain recognition in the West. In 1967, he emigrated to New York, where he lived for several years, and where he developed a bold style of confident strokes and fierce cross-hatchings. During his time in the United States, Souza was considered technically innovative, and went on to produce works by chemical alteration – a technique of drawing with the use of chemicals on printed pages, manipulating the surface. However, he was largely known for his head portraits, and landscapes, which often had themes of Catholicism, the female nude, and violent or sexual motifs.
Souza was awarded the John Moore Prize (Liverpool, 1957); the Italian Government Scholarship (1960); and the Guggenheim International Award (New York, 1967). Among a number of exhibitions during his lifetime, his works were recently shown posthumously at The Jehangir Nicholson Art Foundation, titled ‘F.N. Souza: The Power and the Glory.’ Souza died in Bombay in 2002.
