The manifestation of individualism and the breaking of barriers between caste and class began to be evident in India, particularly in the cities, by the 1940s as the country moved towards self-awareness. The shackles of feudalism were to slowly dissolve and issues of historical identity and a selfhood for the nation became part of the new quest for freedom. It became evident that modernism would provide the vehicle for these growing aspirations and would play a major performative role in the alteration of consciousness. The post-colonial works that would ensue, would transform the largely mimetic and picturesque quality that immobilised art, into works of great vitality and imaginative power.
By the fifties alongside the Progressive Artists in Mumbai, there was the Progressive Writers' Group where writers like Mulk Raj Anand and Ali Sardar Jafri pointed to bold new directions. The Indian Peoples' Theatre Association(IPTA) had memorable plays like Sardar Jafri's Yeh Kiska Khoon (Whose Blood Is This)and Balraj Sahni's Jadu ki Kursi (The Magic Chair) which depicted social evils and their consequent ill effects on the masses. These were heady days for Bombay cinema with unforgettable films like Achut Kanya (The Untouchable Girl) and Devdas which spoke of romantic love as against the barriers of relationships introduced by issues of caste and class. It was a climate of consciousness and although the Progressive Artists did not conjoin with any of these groups the spirit of breaking new paths was infectious.
As this layered modernity with its panoply of aesthetic codes set in, it was inevitably the city that became the focus for the emergence of the works of the artists. It was here that a vital consciousness arose from diverse forms of urban awareness, as also a forceful need for articulation of their own expression. Arguably it was the underbelly of existence that became the prime focus as many of the artists scouted the lanes and bylanes of critical intersections in literal and metaphoric terms. In Bombay, a small community of artists got together in 1947 to form the Progressive Artists’ Group in the very year that India gained Independence, and made a strong bid for modernism in art and to root it in the country of their origin. Initiated by the artist Francis Newton Souza [1924—2002] the bold distortions of the human visage and frank exposures of the body largely created by him, aroused a strong reaction. The other artists in the Group which consisted of M.F. Husain, S.H.Raza, K.H. Ara, S.K.Bakre and H.A.Gade forefronted a modernism which critiqued the outmoded practices of schools of art and rejected outright the revivalistic approach of the Bengal School. The Group, inadvertently in coming together also symbolized the transcendence of the divisions created by religion, regions and caste.
The transition to modernism, however was slow and painful and met with a great deal of resistance. To begin with it was the rebellious artist Souza himself, the founder of the Group, whose work created a furore. An early exhibition held by him in Bombay displayed a painting of his own full length nude and caused an uproar. The artist Krishen Khanna recounts:’ As I walked up the stairs, I passed a rather well-dressed woman muttering to herself. At first I thought she was chanting a mantra. I listened more intently and heard her saying quite audibly,'Disgusting, absolutely disgusting.' That was a prelude to what I was about to see. It was an exhibition of Francis Newton Souza. Right in the middle of the centre-wall was his self-portrait, in the nude. …Of course, females in the nude were an acknowledged and much desired subject matter; but males, in spite of their legacy of Michelangelo, had to keep their underpants on and their flies buttoned up. The police intervened and the 'offending' portion of the anatomy in the self-portrait was suitably covered, thereby attracting still more attention.’1
The new iconography created in modern Indian art was largely bought about by Souza who with his devilish heads, voluptuous women and apocalyptic landscapes would expose the seamier side of existence. These were images which were deftly made with few bold strokes and etched out the human physiognomy in his women and men in all its disingenuity. In engaging with these, the artist was to make eminently modern forms which depicted contemporary life.
Souza, who was born in Portugese Goa, had a strict Catholic upbringing. Yet far from growing into a devout Christian he became ferociously anarchic against the rigidities and the corrupt practises of the Church. His Christ was unlike the compassionate figure usually visible, but rather the vengeful God of Romanesque Churches in Spain-- both dark and powerful. As he stated, ‘ As a child I was fascinated by the grandeur of the Church and the stories of tortured saints my grandmother used to tell me…The Roman Catholic Church had a tremendous influence over me, not its dogmas but its grand architecture and the splendour of its services.’2
The dual streak of violence and tenderness underlie Souza’s most rebellious works and create elegiac renderings of the magnificent. But it was mostly the simmering evil—not in the trenches of war but at the very doorstep --that he was preoccupied with and would expose its entrails in order that it be faced squarely in all its darkness. He describes his world view graphically, ‘It is the serpent in the grass that is really fascinating. Glistening, jewelled, writhing in the green grass. Poisoned fangs and cold-blooded. Slimy as squeezed paint. Green hood, white belly from chin to tail, yellow eyes, red forked tongue, slimy; careful not to put your foot on it; trecherous like Satan yet beautiful like Him.’3
Souza exercised an inherent freedom of invention in painting figures of authority with a great deal of irreverence. His Christ, it might be noted is monstrous with large, spiky teeth and eyes staring bulbously from the forehead. The papal hierarchy is seen as ghoulish and the cardinal with bared teeth and a sinister expression seems manipulative and evil.
While his themes were predominantly Christian, Souza’s demonic strokes etched out a merciless and vindictive god and his cardinals, saints and priests were both cunning and corrupt. As a child he had grown up worshipping a wrathful and awe-inspiring god transported to the colonies in his particularly agonizing aspect. He also assimilated, on a visit to the Catalonian Museum in Barcelona while in Europe, the hieratic figures of Romanesque art, with their hypnotic, transfixed gaze delineated in bold lines and dressed in elaborately ornamental and colourful garments. Souza in imbibing these, turned them inside out making the transfixed frontal images sinister and petrified, to reveal the hypocricy of the Church as well as the elite. In his well known painting Mr. Sebastian elsewhere, made in 1955, we have the saint in a dark suit and menacing countenance.The arrows which pierced his body are jabbed into his face and neck vehemently as if in vengeance for his evil deeds. Not surprisingly The Crucifixion made in 1959, another noted work, has Christ more as an effigy made of thorny sticks and a gruesome face with whiskers and teeth. He is flanked by ragged and somewhat sinister men in patchy clothes. Souza had visited Rome on an Italian Government scholarship in 1962 and famously made images like Death of the Pope(1962) and others were to follow. It is evident that the artist wanted to lay bare the hypocricy of religious authority and their cunning manipulations in connivance with the rich. As he stated ‘Renaissance painters painted men and women making them look like angels..I paint for angels, to show them what men and women really look like.’4
Ghoulish Heads, Rich and the Powerful
Souza’s gallery of goons however acquired depth and dimension when he impasted on his papal figures the personification of power and corruption amongst the upper classes. His growing skill in revealing the grotesque resulted in heads which were to bare the canker within the soul as it were. The forehead is replaced by cold, soulless eyes, the mouth is a container of gnashing teeth and the face is a ridged, rocky terrain bounded by ferocious lines which is petrified by its own violence. It is to his credit that he did not spare himself either. A self-portrait made by the artist’s in these years is well known as an image which is pierced with hatchings and with glittering, malevolent teeth which he considered ‘Not on the Day of Resurrection but today’5
The heads made by him, many of them revealed in this show, are distinctive, powerful and wholly nefarious. The colours streaked on these would project the inhuman contours within, as well as the plasticity of the composition making it entirely modern. The head in this exhibition,with its streak of electric blue delineating hollow features, would describe the contortions of the soul. In another work, the face with its green patch could as well reflect the shadowy vestments of the personality. The denouement of the upper classes with their apparels of polite behaviour and their underlying corruption make a powerful impact. In time to come the foetus heads, as Souza would have them, became tubular, then dotted with wriggles and squibbles and finally composed of octagonal shapes connected with funnels. We see the whole repertoire of these ghoulish faces in their various phases of transformation in the present show. Beginning with his own self-portraits as a student at the J.J.School of Art where he depicts himself as a swashbuckling youth with his Errol Flynn moustaches we are delivered to the frenzied strokes of some of his later heads which create almost vegetal shapes which can barely be discerned as human. In these extraordinary demonic and at the same time mobile visages we have the inner workings of the soul revealed as it were. In making these distortions Souza was able to form the very morphology of the face and to create his assembly of power and corruption.
The artist was to construe an extraordinarily mobile and virile visage with the sheer simplicity of the line—two parallel strokes cross- hatched on either side. And he was not unaware of this ‘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 and 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 or they started painting garbage cans, thereby avoiding the whole problem of draughtsmanship. He stumped them and the whole of western world into shambles. When you examine the face, the morphology, I am the only artist who has taken it a step further.’6 Even if the comparison with Picasso’s achievements was decidedly exaggerated, it could be said that his inventive heads were a powerful painterly arsenal in the flaying of the well-heeled and the corrupt. Indeed, at their most powerful they were to arouse the sheer horror of man’s inhumanity to man.
Souza constructed grotesques faces with soulless eyes placed on the forehead, gnashing mouth fully bared, the face a ridged, rocky terrain bounded by lines and petrifed by its own violence. One marvels at the simplicity of means by which this extraordinarily mobile visage is constructed with dexterous cross-hatched strokes used like harpooning spears. The bristling effect he created with this replaced shading, and at its most frenzied formed the main characteristic of the form. His strong, bold and voluptuous outline then enclosed the entire frame. He deployed these faces to expose the decadence of the upper classes, indeed races.
When Souza arrived in London in 1949 he experienced its post war angst where ravaged buildings and food shortages cast their gloomy shadows.According to the dramatist and art connoisseur, Mr. E. Alkazi,’ On other occasions I remember taking a handcart full of Souza's paintings and going up and down Oxford Street and Bond Street trying to sell them.’7
But after a few years of deprivation, Souza began to gain recognition in 1954, when he participated in the group show held at the Institute of Contemporary Arts along with artists like Graham Sutherland and Francis Bacon, with whom he had a particular affinity. Reflecting the dark mood of the post- war era artists like Francis Bacon(1909-1992) created human figures which expressed the hideous, the brutal and the violent in man. A large retrospective of Bacon which took place at the Tate in 1962 displayed these anguished figures with their seething, gnashing, gyrating movement. The encounter with the poet, critic and editor of Encounter , Stephen Spender which had brought about his participation in the exhibition was also to lead to the publication of his autobiographical essay ‘Nirvana of a Maggot’in Encounter the following year and won him further acclaim.This also coincided with his solo exhibition in 1955 at Gallery One. Writing on this exhibition the famed critic John Berger wrote,’ How much his pictures derive from Western art and how much from the hieratic temple traditions of his country, l cannot say. Analysis breaks down and intuition takes over. It is obvious that he is a superb designer and an excellent draughtsman. I find it quite impossible to assess his work comparatively. Because he straddles several traditions but serves none’ 8
It was evident that Souza’s work would be included in the pantheon of the grotesque and fractured akin to the works of artists like Francis Bacon and Graham Sutherland.
By the 1980s the artist’s tubular forms were often titled after Indian deities like Ganesh with five or six protruding tusks.As the art historian Geeta Kapur points out, ‘The heads of Ganesa drawn with a black line over a mottled surface of thick paint looks so similar to his continuous series of deformed heads that it seems pointless to insist that it is Ganesa at all. Fortunately there are a few examples where Souza shows at least a consciousness of the problem involved , and that by the evidence precisely of his changed language…The persistent, self-assertive line which always defined (and over-defined) the figure is worked out of the picture, so that the brush-work surfaces in a loose open-ended pattern, giving the forms of the figure an expansive quality and an aspect of being alternately in and out of focus. To complement this he has changed his palette…The gods are painted in light, gaudy colours and a conspicuous device of stipling the outer edges of forms with white blobs of paint is used to make them appear almost fluorescent. Illumined with garlands of light, their shapes, dissolve and congeal as if they were the particles of a dream…There is an even more difficult question and one that Souza has far from answered. Can one give a new form to an icon-image if one does not relate to the deep set numen that it embodies? And does not the numen altogether escape when it is handled by profane hands?’9 Yet even when the inspiration was depleted there seemed to be an occasional emergence of a brilliantly deviced head which would defy boundaries and create notions of an incandescent form.
Women of our Times
Souza’s delineation of women was frankly sexual as they bared themselves in their full nudity. According to him women had an inherently sexual appetite which had been restrained because of the Victorian mode and had been unknown to the country before colonial times. In the painting where the frontally bared woman is flanked by three men she could be seen to be unveiling herself in all her fullness. The somewhat orgiastic feeling of sexual voluptuary is at the same time countered by the revelation of unhindered desire and its appeasement.
Inevitably Souza’s mother was his first muse and generated his dual attitude of awe and irreverence for women. His mother Lily Mary, it might be recalled, had been a seamstress who had come to live in Bombay to eke out a living after her husband died. Earning a modest amount she had managed to get her son admitted to a Jesuit school. True to his rebellious nature, however, Souza was expelled both from the school as well as the J.J.School of Art. He was dismissed from the former for inscribing erotic doodles on the wall of the boys’ room. He explained that he had merely ‘corrected an existing drawing’. At the age of sixteen he enrolled in 1945 at the Sir J.J. School of Art the pivot for art education in the period when he along with other politically active students was suspended for his activities in support of Gandhi’s Quit India movement and never returned.
On the day he was made to leave the art college in 1945, he went home and started painting furiously by squeezing pigment directly from the tube onto his mother’s sewing board and spreading the paint around with a palette knife. The painting that emerged was of an awesome feminine figure which he titled The Blue Lady and it was bought by Dr.Herman Goetz and hangs at the Baroda Museum. ‘It was an angry, impulsive picture, and in painting it he discovered the way he wanted to paint,’10
It might be noted that Souza’s earliest experience of iconic women was the Black Mary from his childhood days in Goa where the figure was both awesome and aroused fear. The image of the Black Madonna ,where she and the infant Jesus, are depicted with dark skin, hark back to Byzantine times. There is a possible pagan origin of the cult of black Madonna where the dusky representation of pre-Christian deities were reimagined as the Madonna and the child. Souza in his growing years would find the dark skinned goddess both awe inspiring and fearful and these two emotions would characterise his engagement with the female image. Thus the powerful woman whom he feels compelled to depend on as well as demolish is evident in his work Pieta (1963) where the overpowering figure of Mary clasps a vulnerable Christ in a gesture of tender protectiveness. As he wrote, ‘My mother was like the mother of Oedipus; spartan in shape. She was temperamentally unpredictable and very sophisticated. I used to watch her bathe herself through a hole I had bored in the door. I was afraid if she thrust something in, I might get a bleeding eye-ball. I drew her on the walls and prudes thought I was rude. I can’t see why, because as far as I can recollect, I had even painted murals on the walls of her womb.’11 Souza would draw his women with a sense of bravado rather like a rebellious child who was doing something forbidden. The flip side of this would be the reverence and awe which he would always have for women.
Souza’s women were transfused with a classical streak and the graceful lines of the sculptures he saw in India of dancers and divinities. It must be noted that the earliest works which inspired him were the South Indian bronzes and the high relief erotic carvings of the Khajuraho temples, which he saw in reproductions in art books. Apart from the puritanical attitude of conventional society which he wanted to flout, Souza also turned away from the academic and rigid art taught in art schools in India and turned towards the great art available to him. As Edwin Mullins points out, ‘He found in classical Indian sculpture and miniatures a tradition of erotic art incomparably more sensitive and pure than the lifeless figures after Raphael so admired by art-professors, and Hoffman’s ‘blond operatic Christs and flaxen-haired shy Virgins’ which as a child he had been encouraged to imitate at the Jesuit school in Bombay. ’12
Indeed if any comparison can be made if would be with the Austrian artist Egon Schiele (1890-1918)whose frankly
erotic women also veered towards the pornographic.Schiele’s women were repeatedly poised in explicit and sexually revealing poses where their anatomy became the concentrated focus of the viewer. As it was pointed out, ‘This tangled merging of the grotesque and erotic continues to intrigue us: are Schiele’s portrayals of the female form radical, allowing women to reclaim their bodies and embrace their sexuality in a time of strict female oppression, or are they the subject of Schiele’s own misogynistic desires? …Schiele portrays the female subject as much more than a passive muse; often the women’s gaze confrontationally meets that of the viewer. For example, his Seated Female Nude stares out from the canvas, her body cross-legged and folded over itself. She is not depicted as a submissive nude, but as a woman with her own agency.13 It could also be said of Souza’s women that their direct, frontal positions which met the viewer’s gaze made them into people who were in full possession of their own persona.
Souza’s treatment of sensuality was ritualistic and the stylisation which overlooked incidental details, the assured handling of line defining the bends of the body and the treatment of the flat surface as movement rather than depth seem to have been influenced by classical Indian art. In his early work ,figures of women bound by stiff, hieratic lines inspired both awe and grandeur but the demonness with savage expressions and claws for hands would also be present. The later years, however, was to see these looming women with pendulous breasts and pneumatic bodies bereft of passion and energy in their anaemic reality. Souza’s dual attitude towards women, tender and ferocious is evident in many of these works. The pregnant woman—presumably his American wife—and the birth of his son are those which are laced with affection and joy—and seem to emerge of its own accord from hidden depths. In a particular instance he makes a drawing which has the birth of the baby from the mother with her legs wide apart alongside the father composed of his hallmark fractured face and the inscription, ‘Birth of Francis Patrick, Roosevelt Hospital, Oct 27, 1971, 3.35 pm’. In these works, we see an unmitigated expression of celebration of family life which is acknowledged by the artist with deft strokes and frank postures.
The bold contours of his women in the early years which were awe- inspiring where their looming form was akin to mother goddesses to the women bereft of grandeur, with mammoreal and somewhat overpowering breasts, veering towards the lewd and seductive in his later years, Souza’s feminine depictions were many- sided and boldly individualistic. At all times, however, the women exposing themselves fully frontally to those who revelled in revealing their nudity, we had an outcry not only against sexual repression but also against the hypocricy of civil society which existed in a post war world. Should it be said that repressed sexuality was for Souza a mode which he found not just foreign to his own culture but he rebelled against its prognostic outcome and wanted to open its borders to a larger, more diverse world? His art was an expression of these beliefs and yet differed from his pluralistic personal life. As he stated,
‘My painting is a product of my libido . All the colours,all the enjoyment even if I’m doing some horrific Crucifixion is an act of my libido. Because even the Crucifixion is the reverse side of the sexual act sadism—I am not making the error of confusing the reality of woman, the beauty , with the painted representation of woman…When I’m painting I’m making a picture. I am not confusing that with taking her to bed. Not at all. The woman who goes to bed is the reality, just like me. And I treat her with respect, just as I treat myself with respect. I don’t abuse myself. Nature is beauty and this beauty exists in woman.’14
The couple in coitus in Souza’s works are for him a ritual act, resonant of the sublime mithuna postures of temple sculptures. However these gradually transform to an act of a plebeian sexual engagement where the entire gamut of man-woman relationship, sometimes verging on the overexposed, is played out. From the passionate to a power game the common thread remains the volatile, deep and involuntary involvement of both sexes actively engaged with each other. In a few works, however, we have the man- woman relationship treated as part of a heightened experience where the couple are locked in embrace, indistinguishable from each other in their oneness, in a glowing trance of sublime reverie.
Houses falling asunder
In his cataclysmic landscapes Souza was far removed from the picturesque and calm vistas seen in paintings of the period. At first these compositions were simple rectilinear shapes which give way in the sixties to an exploding vision. The houses seem to be bursting by seismic undercurrents, of a world of holocaust and nuclear threat where nothing remains stable or consistent. His turbulent composition threatened to tear things asunder as if by underground eruptions. The houses slide downwards, and seem to fall into an abyss of nothingness and we have fortress like buildings tottering on the verge of dissolution, shaking the very foundations of polite society.
In his still lifes, we have the objects in sheer close-up as if they were being studied by the camera. There seems to be a move towards angles and positions which would draw from his experience of wider world and would frame his objects. They are far removed from the intimate comforts of home and glisten with a studied reference to aspirational belongings. The artist is also noted for making still lifes of liturgical objects which retain a sense of the sacred that have been squeezed out from the human and the divine.
Souza’s creation of chemical paintings where he would bleach portions of glossy magazine pictures and then draw over these areas creating gross caricatures and heightened compositions seemed to verge on the surreal and a sense of an existent reality which was being violently disrupted. This was used by him primarily during the Bangladesh war, in the early seventies, when he took photographs of destroyed bodies mainly from Time magazine, bleached and dissolved the images and made marks of further mutilation and disaster. Somewhat like sinister graffiti, the brutally mangled forms against dissolving houses create an atmosphere of hallucinatory disruptions. The inner despair coalesced with the surrounding chaos to result in works which yet create an atmosphere of catastrophic violence.
It has been suggested that Souza’s creations were almost by default in that he borrowed the language not just of Romanesque art, but of the School of Paris painters like Picasso. Yet to counter this it can be pointed out that modernist forms which arose out of industrialization and urbanization in the West drew from the ‘primitive’ which they were introduced to in ethnographic museums in their own as well as colonised countries. Thus Souza was incorporating the ‘primitive’ via the mediation of the West. As he emphasized, ‘If modern art is hybrid, what is the School of Paris? Matisse is “Persian”, Van Gogh is “Japanese”, Picasso is “African”, Gaugin is “Polynesian”. Indian artists who borrow from the School of Paris are home from home’15 In his view he was merely reclaiming the ‘primitive’ and re-inventing it to create his expression.
A move to modernism which was forefronted by Souza was one where passion coalesced with dynamic strokes to construct works of great imaginative heights. In providing a vocabulary for a strong and buoyant art which existed alongside a strident criticism of the corruption among the rich and the well-heeled he was to make a definitive mark. The bold language created by him not only privileged him as a pioneer of modernism but was to provide inspiration in art as well as in life to successive generations as they mapped their way to an India which was coming into being.
Yashodhara Dalmia
