MAYA ROSE FERNANDES
Last month, a painting called ‘The Lovers’, by FN Souza fetched USD 4,890,000 – a record for Souza’s paintings, and work by a Goan artist.
If you’re Goan and haven’t yet heard this name before, maybe you should get more familiar with it. Many call him overrated.
MF Husain called him a mentor. This co-founder of Bombay’s prestigious Progressive Artists' Group is tagged as an Indian modernist painter, and his art style is multi-encompassing and poignantly figurative.
He is known for his landscapes, nudes, figures and variations of Christ’s Crucifixion. One can spot Picasso, Van Gogh, Matisse and many other artistic influences in his earlier works and sketches.
Artists often copied each other’s styles while still finding their feet. But, his style seems to have taken a key turn in the latter half of his career when everything became coloured with what critics keep referring to as a raw, visceral darkness.
Souza moved from Saligao to Bombay, and then, to post-war London, in search of patronage and better prospects, where Freud and Bacon were his contemporaries.
Souza moved from Saligao to Bombay, and then, to post-war London, in search of patronage and better prospects, where Freud and Bacon were his contemporaries.
In 2018, I attended a Tate Britain exhibition in London titled ‘All Too Human’ which had some of FN Souza’s landscapes, nudes, figures and an amazingly unsettling Crucifixion in galleries that also showcased work by Francis Bacon and Lucien Freud, along with other Post-War Britain artists.
The juxtaposition of Bacon’s, Freud’s and Souza’s work made me notice even more the realism in the visual exploration of what makes us human.
Bacon’s art is by far much more psychotic and disturbing, and Freud’s paintings display a deeper penetration of the psyche and perturbing emotionality in his figures than Souza’s.
Nevertheless, these qualities are very much present in Souza’s work, and make his paintings stand out for the sheer way gazing upon them can make you feel discomfort or resonance.
Souza’s work can disturb your shadows and make you cringe. That’s the beauty of it.
Last month, a painting called ‘The Lovers’, by FN Souza fetched USD 4,890,000 – a record for Souza’s paintings, and work by a Goan artist.
Souza finally moved to New York, where he spent most of the latter part of his life, before moving back to Bombay.
A Goa-based journalist friend recently told me that when Souza died in 2002 in Bombay (now Mumbai), she pitched a piece about the man’s work and life to all the major Goan papers, but none of the editors were interested in running it.
News about his death ended up buried in the obituary pages instead of him receiving his due, she said.
This year is the centenary of his birth, and you should catch the work of this influential Indian modernist while you can, at the Sunaparanta Goa Centre for the Arts, in Panjim, where a collection of his works are on display until May 11, 2024.
It’s one of the rare chances to see his work, and especially these particular pieces, which come from a private collection.
It’s a shame that artists need to achieve multi-million sales of their art before people really take notice of their value.
I hope that we won’t wait for that to happen before we make artists like Vamona Navelcar and Angelo da Fonseca household names, regularly displaying their work, among other things, so that we can value homegrown artistic talent without waiting for multi-million dollar sales at prestigious art auctions to appreciate the value of our own artists.