Francis Newton Souza
By Arshia Dhar
There’s something about F. N. Souza’s art that shocks, amuses, and even challenges one’s senses all at the same time—in a sensory overdrive, if you will. The dust jacket of this monograph—titled F. N. Souza: The Archetypal Artist published by Niyogi Books—laying bare the life and mind of one of India’s greatest modernists by art scholar Janeita Singh carries a quote by the father of analytical psychology Carl Jung. It says “...the art of life is the most distinguished and rarest of all arts,” to succinctly sum up what the book has to offer—an exposition on Souza’s “art of life” that continues to enthral an unsuspecting passerby and critic alike.
The book peels the various layers of Souza in five sections, starting with the artist’s meditations on women and their sexuality, followed by early nature paintings and his depictions of the grotesque, with all of it tied together by the concluding section “Through a Jungian Lens and East-West Philosophy”. The last segment attempts to cohesively affiliate his myriad artistic liberties termed “transgressions”, more often than not, through depth psychology and yogic philosophy.
The Goa-born artist (1924), stirred a curiosity that made the viewer shift in their seats the same way a voyeur would. The viewer enjoys what they see—an almost pornographic representation of the human form, dripping life like raw honey—and aren’t ready to look away just yet. But they’re too squeamish to hang the image on their living room walls, as Singh points out, or even admit to the curiosity it evokes in them. It alludes to how Souza belongs to everyone—especially in their deepest, darkest, most vulnerable moments—and yet, can’t be owned by any.
Singh wisely mines this “uneasy space” Souza occupies in the popular imagination and makes it her raison d’être, especially during a time when at a Christie’s auction in March this year, his iconic work The Lovers (1949), broke all sales records by netting a staggering Rs. 40 crores.
The central archetype that Singh sets for the artist is that of a feminist, who, perhaps, was unaware of the term when he sketched his rotund women with exaggerated curves, making love to men or themselves, or suckling a baby unassumingly. He demystified the female body with his idiom of subverting social mores through lenses as wide-ranging as the Indian classical Kamasutra to Redmondism, an obscure theory of nature tendered by a Sanford Redmond, an American inventor in the ‘80s. It suggested, through a paid advertorial in The New York Times in 1980, that “nature”, which constitutes certain elements and forces, is the driver of every phenomenon and activity we witness and experience. Souza extended the hypothesis and conflated it with the Sankhyas and Tantras in Hindu yogic philosophies, which Singh distils into his egotistic, hypersexual disposition.
It’s in this disposition that Souza found his personal and creative freedom as an artist frowned upon during his life like every other maestro is in their times. He straddled spiritual dichotomies, struggled with his Catholicism, and through his work, performed the problematic of an identity that was resolutely Indian, and yet challenged the Western gaze on the subaltern. Illustrating this argument, Singh writes in the sub-chapter “The Ballad of Sexual Dependency”: “A look back at Souza as a young artist (16-20 years), introduces society to a classy oeuvre of subversive art undertaken with keen sensitivity and empathy, which disrupts many a myth perpetuated by the powerful West.”
But the pièce de résistance in this treatise is chapter 3.1 titled “My Growing-up Years in Goa/Bombay and Early Art,” where the writer audaciously pulls a ventriloquist act, putting herself in his shoes, furnishing her voice to tell his stories from the 1940s. Singh’s shared Goa roots with Souza allow her to seamlessly slip into the skin of the life lived on a bucolic landscape that the artist intermittently fell back on while revisiting Biblical themes of Christ’s Passion through paintings like the Burial of Christ, the Supper at Emmaus, or the numerous renditions of the Last Supper.
The sterile stringency of Souza’s Catholic upbringing collided head-on with the visceral eroticism of the Hindu imagery found in the carvings of the Khajuraho temples that caught his fancy. Throughout his life, Souza straddled these worlds with an ebb and flow of ease and unease that still confounds and entertains the world. Singh’s book, which was 12 years in the making, captures the contrarian that Souza was with lyricism and intrepidity that the artist would have certainly approved of.