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拍品專文
Across his extensive artistic career, the nude female figure remained a subject of both endless fascination and considerable torment for Francis Newton Souza. Frequently revisiting this archetype, Souza’s extended engagement with the female form is well documented. “The bare-breasted, unashamedly sexual women made by Souza are by now well-known. Yet with each encounter we are faced afresh with their voluptuous sexuality. A fact often overlooked is the tenderness, bordering on a caress with which the feminine contours are drawn” (Y. Dalmia, The Demonic Line, New Delhi, 2001, p. 6). As Dalmia suggests, these works explore a wide range of physiognomies, from the most sublime and tender nudes to distorted and grotesque figures, expressing the artist’s complex views on the human condition, corruption, sexuality and religion.
In his paintings from the early 1960s, Souza engages directly with the legacy of Pablo Picasso, drawing on the latter’s elongated, fragmented and abstracted human forms. Although inspired by Picasso’s forceful distortions, Souza evolved this vocabulary into something entirely his own, pushing the figure into even more unsettling, exaggerated and psychologically charged territory.
The present lot marks a significant departure from Souza’s bold, instantly recognizable female nudes of the late 1950s, works characterized by their raw sexuality and sense of the primitive, the unfamiliar, the ‘other’. Painted in 1961, it is also a departure from the genre of the reclining nude, the basis of some of the most iconic works by Old Masters to Modernists and a trope Souza engaged with in several of his own works. The current composition appears imbued with an almost kinetic energy: its forms dissolve into fluid masses of lines and shapes, only loosely suggesting the body of a reclining nude situated within a lush, verdant setting. It seems as if the female figure here is being actively absorbed into the landscape that surrounds here, rendering her more an active element of the natural world than a a passive subject of the male gaze.
Speaking about his paintings of women, the artist irreverently noted, “My paintings are not a product of love or anger. My painting is a product of my libido. I am not making the error of confusing the reality of women, the beauty, with painted representation of women. When I’m painting, I am painting a picture – I am not confusing that with taking her to bed” (Artist statement, Souza 1940s – 1990s, New Delhi, 1999, unpaginated).
In his paintings from the early 1960s, Souza engages directly with the legacy of Pablo Picasso, drawing on the latter’s elongated, fragmented and abstracted human forms. Although inspired by Picasso’s forceful distortions, Souza evolved this vocabulary into something entirely his own, pushing the figure into even more unsettling, exaggerated and psychologically charged territory.
The present lot marks a significant departure from Souza’s bold, instantly recognizable female nudes of the late 1950s, works characterized by their raw sexuality and sense of the primitive, the unfamiliar, the ‘other’. Painted in 1961, it is also a departure from the genre of the reclining nude, the basis of some of the most iconic works by Old Masters to Modernists and a trope Souza engaged with in several of his own works. The current composition appears imbued with an almost kinetic energy: its forms dissolve into fluid masses of lines and shapes, only loosely suggesting the body of a reclining nude situated within a lush, verdant setting. It seems as if the female figure here is being actively absorbed into the landscape that surrounds here, rendering her more an active element of the natural world than a a passive subject of the male gaze.
Speaking about his paintings of women, the artist irreverently noted, “My paintings are not a product of love or anger. My painting is a product of my libido. I am not making the error of confusing the reality of women, the beauty, with painted representation of women. When I’m painting, I am painting a picture – I am not confusing that with taking her to bed” (Artist statement, Souza 1940s – 1990s, New Delhi, 1999, unpaginated).