Francis newton souza

F.N. Souza: The eternal rebel Like a blithe child colouring on the walls despite protests, nothing deterred F.N. Souza (b. 1924) from asserting his art. His art, whose first impact is to shock, elicits a childlike element of uninhibited honesty with no filter, unafraid, and almost oblivious to those offended. His unrestrained and thought-provoking body of work makes one wonder about the power of art and its hold over the human psyche. Broad and bold lines jump out of the canvas attacking with speed, deeming him an eternal rebel. I have made my art a metabolism. I express myself freely in paint to exist. I paint what I want, what I like, what I feel. When I begin to paint I am wrapped in myself, rapt; unaware of chromium cars and décolleté dillentantes, wrapped like a fetus in the womb only aware that each painting for me is either a milestone or a tombstone... I do not unwrap myself when I paint. I unwrap myself when I write. When I press a tube I coil. Every brush stroke makes me recoil like a snake struck with a stick. I hate the smell of paint. Painting for me is not beautiful.[1] Early life Born in Goa, Newton Souza lost his father three months after his birth and his sister a year later. The grief and sickness that followed painted in his mind a bleak picture of the world in which he lived. Souza and his mother Lilia moved from Goa to Bombay where he contracted smallpox and was sent back to live with his grandmother. His childhood was immersed in nature and Konkani Ca...

FRANCIS NEWTON SOUZA Born 1924 in Gao, India. Died 2002 in Mumbai, India. F. N. Souza’s works drew inspiration from the folk art of his native Goa alongside various European sources such as the full-blooded paintings of the Renaissance, landscapes of the 18th and 19th centuries, and the dynamism of Cubist composition. A recurrent theme in his work was the dichotomy of male/female relationships, with an emphasis upon the related conflicts, friction and sexual tensions. In his drawings, Souza managed to capture fine detail even with an economy of line; he also favored crosshatched strokes to compose the overall structure of his subjects. As one of the founders of the Progressive Artists' Group in 1947 – along with M. F. Husain, S. H. Raza, and others – Souza led the charge of the Indian modernist art movement. He was the only Indian artist to be included in Tate Modern’s group exhibition on 20th century modernism in 2002. An iconoclast known for his powerful and provocative imagery, Souza’s unrestrained and graphic style was a source of controversy in both his art and life. His repertoire covered still life, landscape, nudes and icons of Christianity, boldly rendered in a frenzied distortion of form. Souza's paintings express defiance and impatience with convention and the banality of everyday life. Born 1924, Saligaon, Goa, India Died 2002, Bombay, India Francis Newton Souza was born in India in 1924 and is of Goan Christian origin. As one of the co-founders of the Progress...

India's most important, and famous, modern artist Francis Newton Souza, who has died aged 77 was of a generation whose creative roots remained anchored securely and authentically to the expressive modernism inspired by Picasso. Born in the Portuguese Catholic colony of Goa, Souza was brought up by his mother, a dressmaker. In 1929 after the family moved to Bombay, he survived smallpox - and his mother added the name Francis as a mark of respect to Goa's patron saint St Francis Xavier. Having been expelled from schools in 1937 and 1939, he entered the Sir JJ school of art in Bombay in 1940 (now Mumbai) where he was mainly taught the British academic tradition. He was expelled in 1945. In 1947 he was awarded first prize in the Bombay art society annual exhibition. He joined the Communist party and founded the progressive art group along with KH Ara, SK Bakre, HA Gade, MF Husain, and SH Raza. When his pictures were shown at Burlington House a year later, Souza decided to make his home in England and in 1949 he settled in London. For the next five years he struggled to make an impact, but being a talented writer, he made a living out of journalism . Later, his early autobiographical essay Nirvana Of A Maggot - which was published in 1955 - was sent to Stephen Spender. He introduced Souza to Victor Musgrave, Gallery One's owner and in 1955 his first show sold out A decade of almost unbroken successfollowed. But 1964 proved to be a difficult year. In a recent letter he wryly des...

Francis Newton Souza, born in the Portuguese colony of Goa to Indian parents, was brought up as a strict Catholic. In 1949, having become a well-established artist in India, he moved to Britain. After six difficult years living in London, he began to build a considerable reputation as a writer and painter. This painting, which is one of several religious pictures by Souza, refutes the 'blond operatic Christs and flaxen-haired shy Virgins'(Souza, p.8) he had been encouraged to admire at the Jesuit school he went to in Bombay. Instead it emulates 'the impaled image of a Man supposed to be the Son of God, scourged and dripping, with matted hair tangled in plaited thorns' (Souza, p.9) he saw hanging over the altars of the Catholic churches he attended. While the depiction of Christ and the other figures as black represents a significant departure from the western canon, such critics as Edwin Mullins and David Sylvester compared the expressionist vernacular of Souza's work with that of Graham Sutherland (1903-80) and Francis Bacon (1909-92), both of whom had depicted religious subject matter in a similarly brutal style shortly after the Second World War. Indeed, Sutherland painted several crucifixions in the postwar period which referred directly to the Isenheim Altarpiece, 1515 (Unterlinden Museum, Colmar, France) by the German Renaissance painter Matthias Grunewald (c1475-1528), among them Crucifixion, 1946 (Tate N05774). Comparisons were also made to Pablo Picasso's (1881-19...

Reams have been written on Francis Newton Souza, the Indian artist who won fame and fortune in Britain initially and later in New York. This month, a still life by him commanded a price of $2.16 million at a Christie’s auction in New York. But few know the inside story of how he embarked on his autobiography in the mid-1970s. I met Souza at the Indian Consulate in New York at a farewell party for my father in the early 1970s. I was a rookie 20-something journalist on leave from a leading Indian newspaper. Hungry for bylines, I asked him for an appointment. I wanted to write about him, I said. Souza agreed to meet me, before presenting my father with a watercolour, which was eventually handed down to me. We had freewheeling discussions and he also told me of his heyday in Britain, where he had built a reputation early and made good money. He had moved to London in 1949, met Stephen Spender the poet and written an essay in Spender’s Encounter magazine. That essay, Nirvana of a Maggot, in turn attracted the attention of a major art dealer who invited him to exhibit at his gallery. Souza’s works sold out at the 1955 exhibition. He would go on to be one of the five UK artists to be short listed for the 1958 Guggenheim international prize. So Francis Souza had made it to the big time in his early thirties. I did write an article on him. It appeared in a Delhi-based newspaper. He evidently liked it because he telephoned me one day and asked me to drop by. When we met that evening...

THE CITY THAT SHAPED AN ARTIST - FRANCIS NEWTON SOUZA IN LONDON In 1949, Francis Newton Souza left Bombay under a cloud of controversy. His paintings had been deemed too explicit and provocative by the authorities, and Souza moved to London in search of a more liberal audience for his art. It was here that he would remain for the better part of two decades - a period that would define his career. Souza arrived in London a virtually unknown artist. Over his first five years in the United Kingdom, a country still recovering from the aftermath of World War II, the artist struggled to establish himself in the city’s bohemian art and literary circles. In these early years, in search of work and patronage, Souza travelled to Paris in 1952 on a grant, where he was reunited with his fellow Indian modernists Syed Haider Raza and Akbar Padamsee. He travelled across Europe, exhibiting at the Galerie St. Placide (1952) and Galerie Raymond Creuze (1953 and 1954) in Paris, as well as in Zurich (1953) and Rome (1953), before returning to his London home near Belsize Park in Hampstead. In fact, by 1954, Souza was on the brink of conceding defeat and returning to India. As his first biographer, Edwin Mullins noted, “It seemed the only way he [Souza] could go on painting, for at least in India he could sleep in the street if necessary, and live on rice […] if he had been able to find enough money for the passage, he would probably have left.” (E. Mullins, Souza, London, 1962. p. 23) However...

Francis Newton Souza's Goan Village Born in 1924, Souza is best known for being one of the founding members of the Progressive Artists Group. Francis Newton Souza’s ‘Goan Village’is an early masterpiece of the Goa born artist. Growing up, Souza was raised by his mother and was sent to a strict Jesuit school. He, later on,went to St. Xavier’s College in Bombay where he was expelled for his rebellious behavior. After this, he decided to join the JJ School of Art where he met his fellow Progressive Artists’ Group members. Newton rebelled against authority, establishment, and convention throughout his student life and was expelled from the JJ School of Art as well. When Souza was attending art school, he complained that the teachers there were too strict. They did not like to explore the avant-garde movements that were happening in the west at that time and preferred to stick to traditional academic styles. Souza was attracted to the new ideas and movements that were happening outside of the classroom. Souza was not only influenced by western art movements but he was also influenced by the political changes that were happening in India at the time. Souza had witnessed the Bengal Famine of 1943, the Indian Naval Mutiny of 1943, and the Quit India Movement of 1942 by Gandhi. After leaving Bombay, he went back to his Goa to paint in his own style without his teachers telling what he could or couldn't do. He spent a couple of months in a Goan village where he painted scenes that h...