|
REVIEW
F. N. Souza: Remembrance of Things to Come
‘Volte Face,’ a mammoth retrospective of Francis Newton Souza’s drawings, paintings and chemical works from the Dhoomimal Collections curated by Yashodhara Dalmia, was held in
For in much wisdom there is sorrow and he who stores up knowledge stores up grief.’
- Ecclesiastes 1:18
When walking through ‘Volte-Face,’ the F. N. Souza Retrospective at the Lalit Kala Akademi,
Souza has, rather reductively, been labeled – auction star and enfant terrible of Modern Indian Art. Whilst viewing the 200 drawings, paintings and chemical works from the Dhoomimal collection, I realised the compelling painter-poet continually evaded brackets imposed through rigid art historical ‘isms’ and art-world rhetoric. Instead, Souza chose to roam amid creative thresholds, plotting volatile mindscapes and relentlessly probing ugly truths, narratives of lust, death and human travesty.
A small portrait made in black water colour stood beside the entrance to the main gallery; it could have been overlooked as an insignificant work and yet on closer inspection it unravels as a fundamental contemplation on human persona. Souza’s rapid strokes appear as deep scars on the paper surface, combining to form a jagged face, monstrous eyes and a mouth that appears as the entryway to a dark, insatiable cave. In such a portrait, man is symbolically presented as nothing more than a grinning skull. Herein lies the clue to an understanding of Souza’s paintings, in which the emphasis is not on the impermanence of beauty but on the inexorable inevitability of ugliness. (2)
Francis Newton Souza’s work seems to emerge from forbidden places, where the mind strays beyond socially erected borders. His paintings erupt before the viewer as the lines bear a seismic quality; shifting, transforming and even destroying. Through deliberate corporeal disfiguration and a compulsive outlining of malignant tendencies in every character he painted, Souza was creating works that appeared as warning signs rather than affirmations of faith in humanity. He is best remembered for his development of a uniquely sinister visualism – amalgamating modernist techniques with influences from Ancient Indian sculpture, Byzantine iconography, cheap adult magazines and gothic architecture.
‘Volte-Face,’ curated by art historian and writer, Yashodhara Dalmia, witnessed multiple collateral events. A film titled ‘Rebel with a Cause – Francis Newton Souza ,’(Dir. Rohit Suri), was screened through the course of the exhibition. A children’s workshop organized by INTACH-HECS took place at the exhibition venue on the birth anniversary of the artist. The young participants were given a special discussion tour and were then invited to take part in a drawing exercise. Some of their works were displayed at the exhibition with a birthday message to F.N. Souza. ‘Remembering Souza,’ an evening of poetry reading included Krishen Khanna, Ashok Vajpeyi, Jatin Das and Vinod Bhardwaj among others. Conversation panels were also organised with Ebrahim Alkazi, Anjolie Ela Menon and Krishen Khanna. Since each of them had a long standing personal relationship with Souza, they ended up sharing precious anecdotes and discussed Souza’s relationship with modernity, the complex place of women in his life and in his art, as well as his continued relevance as an avant-garde figure.
Art writer Suruchi Khubchandani and I were invited to conduct independent curated walks at the exhibition. Suruchi chose to focus on the existential links in Souza’s artistic practice. While addressing the passions and fears that make an appearance in the artist’s work, she writes, ‘Frequently these passions are not only violent but destructive, as though each painting liberated the artist from a nightmare. The blatant exposure of the other and the self underscores the expanse of artistic maneuvering. Not even the divine is spared. For him (Souza) it was a question of committing to an existential urge.’
The curated walk which I conducted was titled, ‘ Remembrance of Things to Come,’ parallely referencing Marcel Proust and Chris Marker. What repeatedly struck me about Souza’s oeuvre was that his paintings never seem exhausted; they continue to pose dynamic questions to the present, tirelessly unveiling the decadence of contemporary societies. Further, F. N. Souza envisioned the future as a horrific sterile dream. While using a grey palette in one of his early nude paintings, he commented on it symbolising the impending doom that awaits built civilization and warned of nuclear catastrophe caused by the destructive capacity of the human brain.(3) Hence, whilst conducting painstaking autopsies of the past, Souza was simultaneously foregrounding a possible future. Thus, even though the exhibition itself was definitively periodised, I attempted to collapse the frame of linearity in order to map fluid narratives, comparative readings and contemporary views on Souza’s art-works.
The Collection
Of (Anti) aesthetics and social hypocrisy
The Dhoomimal collection possesses several of F. N. Souza’s celebrated ‘heads’ – these span his early artistic career and move into the late 90s. Heads from the 60s found a central place in the ground floor gallery. As psycho-social reflections on the nature of man, Souza’s heads are not flawless masks, they reflect the vices that breed in the soul of the subject. The closeted ‘demonic presence’ is thrust outwards and thus, forcefully (im)planted as grotesque motifs on surface skins. The head is, thus, transformed into a conflictual site – a puzzle that cannot be pieced together, transforming into a peculiar maze of debauchery and cruelty. The heads Souza painted in the 90s are more abstract, some with elephant-like trunks and multiple eyes, others spontaneously painted as chemical alterations on magazine paper.
In an interview with the Yashodhara Dalmia in 1992,(4) Souza claimed – “I have created a new kind of face. In the ‘Last Supper,’ there are two or three faces and they are drawn in a completely new iconography, beyond Picasso. As you know, Picasso redrew the human face. They were magnificent. But I have drawn the physiognomy way beyond Picasso. In completely new terms. And I am still a figurative painter. These fellows gave up after Picasso and became abstract.” Even Souza’s biographer Edwin Mullins has mentioned that his works never threaten to dissolve into formalised abstract shapes.(5) They remain razor-edged and tumultuous, yet the figurative is given primacy and the aesthetic of representation is entirely self-conscious.
It was through the simple but distinctive technique of chemical alteration that Souza resolutely expressed his angst, fears and obsessions on magazine covers and the inside pages of adult magazines. The technique allowed him to delete and alter the content of the page, thus placing his intended message upon it and thereby distorting the inbuilt visual iconography. Several important chemical alteration works were displayed at ‘Volte-Face,’ especially from the late 60s up to the end of 70s. Souza also used the medium of chemical alteration to embark upon socio-political critique. For instance, his diatribe against a ‘morally bankrupt’ political and business class may be witnessed in the displayed chemical work showing grotesques in suits on the front page of the New York Times. Souza frequently expressed his skepticism of the corporate figure, in well-known works like ‘Death of the Pope’ and ‘Six Gentlemen of Our Times,’ suited men appear as villainous parasites, reminding one of a statement that Souza once made, “I use aesthetics rather than bullets or knives as a form of protest against stuffed shirts and hypocrites.” (6)
However, it was not simply the upper classes that Souza attacked; he was perhaps most deeply troubled by the realities of the church. The corruption of the clergy infuriated him and the omnipresence of power-struggles and debauchery in the name of the divine turned him into a staunch cynic. Thus, clergymen, martyrs and popes frequently appear as dysfunctional ‘monstrosities’ in his works. In the version of ‘The Last Supper,’ shown at this exhibition, Christ is seen sitting beside men with mutating faces, some without eyes and others with snake-like eyes that leap out of their heads. As a narrative of treachery, it seems as though Souza re-visits the scene of the last supper as social metaphor. It appears that each one on the table is implicated in the murder of ‘the savior’ and hence, society at large is shown to be doggedly plotting the death of ‘the good.’
A comment that is often made in relation to F. N. Souza is that he was an artist ‘ahead of his times.’ While this may be a misleading observation, it still tempts me to speculate – what if Souza were to respond to the present time – would he still be painting at all? What might he say about the rise in natural calamities, religious fundamentalism, illegal wars and encounter killings?
(1) F.N. Souza, Words and Lines, Villiers, 1959
(2) Audrey Whiting, Modern Art: F. N. Souza, Woman's Journal, Oct. 1961
(3) Aziz Kurtha, Francis Newton Souza – Bridging Western and Indian Modern Art. Mapin Publishing & Grantha Corporation, 2006
(3) Excerpt printed in exhibition catalogue from Dalmia’s forthcoming book, Journeys: Four Generations Of Indian Artists In Their Own Words,
(4) Edwin Mullins, F N Souza, Anthony Blond,
(5) Audrey Whiting, Modern Art: F. N. Souza, Woman's Journal, Oct. 1961
(Natasha Ginwala is a post-graduate student at the School of Arts and Aesthetics, JNU. In 2008, she was part of the curatorial team for the exhibition ‘Where in the World’ at the Devi Art Foundation. She has also completed a post-graduate diploma in Broadcast Journalism from the
