Francis Newton Souza: Pointing a Finger with Dirty Hands

- Vishal Tondon

This article appeared in Searching Lines, Department of History of Art, Kala Bhavan, Santiniketan, Vol 09, 2011

Souza began his career as an artist – according to his own confession – by doodling on the walls of his mother’s womb. I bet, even there he was making odious representations of a world he had yet to encounter. Soon, he was thrown into the midst of a detestable humanity, and being the pugilist that he was, he gladly took to the task of ruffling a feather here and bursting a bubble there. He carried on with his seditious activities in an unflinching manner and with consistency throughout his life. Subversion was not a strategy for Souza; he was the quintessential trouble child who never grew up.

He rebelled against the Father, the Mother, the Church and God. But to him God is not dead. The confrontation with authority is the very business of his life and is the motivation for him to live. To him, to be alive is to fight. God and authority are the alpha and the omega of his obsession. By taking an adversary position to the rebel, they justify his existence.  

Souza is a product of many traditions. Goan by birth, he spent his formative years in Mumbai. He studied at the JJ College of Arts and was expelled for engaging with communist activities. He was one among the Progressive Artists’ Group. Later, in the early 1960s, he moved to Europe, and finally made New York his home. Such is the diversity of influences on him and such was his virtuosity in putting inspiration to good use that it becomes hard to separate the Souza of one continent from another; a task made onerous by the fact that he is everywhere consistent in his rebellion – he is as seditious on one continent as on another. Christian by birth and upbringing, he makes it his mission to turn the tenets of his faith upside down. While Renaissance painters made humans look like angels, Souza, in his own words, sought to make pictures for angels that showed them what we humans looked like; demoniac and absurd.

I guess he looked in the mirror and did not like what he saw. The pock marked face of a man who could be loyal to none but his craft. You look at his self portraits and you know that he was as acutely derisory of himself as of others. He observes himself as a voyeur would. In the same manner that he, as a young boy, observed through a peephole his mother, naked and bathing. Souza’s admission into the world of grown-ups is effected through a transgression. But this is not an indiscretion he would later in his life regret. He is beyond regrets. Everything he does is the stuff of art. Souza the person is always subordinate to Souza the artist.

Souza’s trashing of religious authority and human nature, and his irreverence towards God expose the apparent meaninglessness of everything. Absurdist philosophy suggests three ways in which man can resolve the dilemma of having to live in a meaningless universe. One way is to commit suicide. The other is faith; to wholeheartedly embrace the authority of the higher power. The third way is to revolt against the absurd; this is done by derecognizing all religious and moral constraints and finding in life a meaning of one’s own. Souza’s irreverence is his way of revolting against the absurd. This is Souza’s version of existentialism. 

To Souza, God is not dead. Souza keeps Him alive just so he can trash Him again and again.

When I speak of Souza as the trouble child who never grew up, I also speak of his proclivities for the crude and the brazen. Just as in his college years he would scribble rough and ready images of vulgar sex on toilet walls, so would he do on his paintings meant for the more discerning viewer. It is to Souza’s credit that he would not allow age and experience to corrupt the adolescent in him. It takes the innocence of youth for a person to point a rude finger in our face, and there remained in Souza this pubescent until the autumn of his life. Yes, most of his better work is confrontational. And much of it is crude in its depiction of sex and the body. It would take the beholder to get over the initial moment of shock, and to linger over the work longer before he realized that the real subject matter was beneath the skin. Faced with his paintings of women showing full frontal nudity, can we see beyond the obvious? Do we have a vision for this kind of viewing? Or, are we so crude that we will not afford any credit to the person lingering behind her sex? 

Clearly, the joke is on us.      

Souza flays his female nudes apart. Picasso did this too, and his hapless mistress once remarked that he treated women in life just as he treated them on canvas. An element of sadism is palpable here. When asked about his pillorying of the female form, Souza is said to have remarked, “The woman who goes to bed with me, I treat her with respect.” However invasive the sexual act is, for Souza, the desire to get inside the body remains insatiable. It cannot be quenched in the face of social etiquette. It finds its gratification in art.

Few can elicit disgust as well as empathy for their subjects at the same time. Souza treated the female figure with neither respect nor awe, and his work is witness to his comfort with the female expressing her sexuality. He knew his female subject well enough to bring out her vulnerability as well as malevolence at the same time. Dali is known to have been in awe of female sexuality, even fearful, as we know from his painting ‘The Bleeding Roses.’ But Souza shared a kindred relationship with his female figures; they were as majestic, vain and disgusting as he himself was.

Souza’s strength is his interest in the formal aspects of painting; the figural possibilities are endless through permutations and combinations. This makes for his prolific body of work. His contemporaries who have consistently dealt with the notion of corporeality through formalistic means are Picasso and Francis Bacon and back home, Akbar Padamsee and Tyeb Mehta, amongst others.

He is a maverick at cutting, distorting, mutilating and exaggerating contours and incidents. In his hands, even the holiest of figures and scenes are dehumanized. The figure on the crucifix is broken, bent and reassigned beyond recognition, and looks as debased as the grimacing figures around him. The dead Pope’s body has festered and the skin is drawn back to expose a sinister grimace. The blue of the Pope’s skin colors the bystanders and the entire scene blue. In the face of these pictures, it becomes difficult to reserve sympathy for one character and not for the others. Icons are reduced to their human element and their lives as earthly beings are recounted.  

John Berger has rightly said that Souza straddles many traditions, yet serves none. Servile adherence to any religious, ethnic or artistic school would have been oppressive to Souza. He was his own master. His philosophical estrangement from society recalls Camus’ Mersault from ‘The Outsider.’ This is a person whose perspective of humanity is not at par with that of the world around him. This becomes a cause for consternation for us, as we would like to know who is in the right; we or ‘the outsider.’ Clearly, ‘the outsider’, as he grew up, did not evolve according to the expectations and prescriptions of society. He retained nonchalance in the face of things we might find disconcerting. The people who judge Mersault’s fate are appalled by his inappropriateness; his refusal to cry in the face of his mother’s death and his frolicking with his girlfriend while out on a swim just after his mother’s death. While Mersault was completely unaware of his alienation from societal norms, Souza was acutely aware of it, and he put it to good use in his art. Camus has claimed Mersault as a Christ for our times; a person who will live life to the fullest, as per his own dictates, irrespective of societal pressures. Souza knew that his acute vision alienated him from mankind around him. He observed them from a superior position and everyone, including himself, was but a subject matter for him. True, this furnished him with a certain sense of vanity, but his narcissism in turn became his subject matter. We can see him take a jab at himself in his numerous self portraits. No wonder then that the illustrious and one of the greatest poets of our times, Ezra Pound, should comment on Souza’s gainful vanity. Once, at a soiree where he was reciting the Pisan Cantos, Ezra Pound is said to have remarked to an audience, “Souza is a great man, but I think he knows it.”          

Souza was not given to any sense of discretion when it came to praising himself. This is the person who once gloated merrily that he made more money selling his paintings than the prime minister of Britain.

Souza was very secure about his merits as a craftsman. Just as he went against the grain in his social life, so did him as an intellectual. While the art world had moved on beyond the modernist styles of painting, Souza’s faith in the expressive power of line and color remained unwavering. His work stood up for itself in the face of the 1960s Europe hostility to Expressionism. He could achieve this commendable feat because of his conviction in his work. In the sense that he was enslaved to no convention even as a thinker, Berger’s words ring true once again.

Souza’s dismissal of institution, authority and artistic traditions calls to mind Groucho Marx’s witty comment, “I do not care to belong to any club that would take me as a member.” But there is one grand tradition that the nonconformist artist devoted his life to lampooning. This is the authority of the Church and God. The derision of all that was holy was effected by his acerbic yet virtuous handling of religious-erotic themes. His persistent questioning of organized religion is testimony to his intense spirituality. Troubled he was, but he put his anger and loathing to good use. He used his anger and abhorrence constructively. Therein lays his merit.