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Lot Essay
“As a child I was fascinated by the grandeur of the Church and by 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 splendor of its services. The priest dressed in richly embroidered vestments, the wooden saints painted with gold and bright colours staring vacantly out of their niches.” (Artist statement, Words & Lines, London, 1959, pp. 9-10)
Growing up in the Portuguese colony of Goa on India’s west coast, Francis Newton Souza was captivated by the visual language of the Catholic Church, practicing mass as a child and later attending the Jesuit school St. Xavier’s High School when he moved to Bombay with his mother. Incidentally, the artist was expelled from this school for the controversial and pornographic graffiti he drew on its walls. Ceasing to practice Catholicism from a young age after what he perceived as hypocrisy in its preachers and practices, the visual language associated with the pomp and ceremony of the Church informed his paintings for his entire career. Souza chose specific images that he would return to often, employing them as a base for artistic expression and socioeconomic critique, taking liberal creative license when it came to fidelity to the original religious narratives.
In the present lot, a monumental work painted in 1987, Souza combines two well-known episodes from the New Testament of the Bible, the Annunciation and the Immaculate Conception. In terms of composition and palette, this large format painting seems to pay visual homage to two paintings by the Spanish Renaissance painter El Greco, who along with other artists including Leonardo da Vinci and Bartolomé Esteban Murillo painted versions of these episodes. Souza’s composite image simultaneously shows the two critical scenes in Christian theology: the Virgin Mary’s conception free from original sin and the announcement by the Archangel Gabriel that Mary was to become the mother of Jesus. Like El Greco, Souza depicts the Holy Spirit as a white dove encircled by light that hovers above. These two narratives are often confused, and while all Christians believe in the Annunciation, the Immaculate Conception is an exclusively Catholic doctrine. Souza is perhaps here using pastiche to emphasize the competing dogmas of the Church over which he was so paradoxically conflicted.
Another reason Souza turned to religious narratives in the 1980s was to illuminate them as counterpoints to science, another pillar of fascination for the artist. It was at this time that Souza became influenced by Redmond theory and the new relationship between man, science and nature it propounded. He recalled, “In 1980, in the New York Times, the Redmond theory appeared and it altered my whole view of what I had previously learnt from the greatest minds like Socrates or Plato, or whatever. The Redshift theory enlarges the universe to infinity. Mind you, even Einstein believed that the universe was finite. But the Redshift theory believes the universe is infinite. In fact, it reflects on the early concepts of Indian thought. Santya has said that nature is the sole principle. Procurity is the sole principle (sic) […] But the Redshift theory gives the measurement of the universe. It says that the universe is beginningless and endless, measuring from infinity to infinity, ubiquitously. Everywhere.” (Artist statement, S. Lal, ‘Interview with F.N. Souza – 1994', F.N. Souza, exhibition catalogue, New York, 2008, p. 12) It is perhaps possible that in creating this composite scene, Souza is further highlighting science as the new religion of the future.
Growing up in the Portuguese colony of Goa on India’s west coast, Francis Newton Souza was captivated by the visual language of the Catholic Church, practicing mass as a child and later attending the Jesuit school St. Xavier’s High School when he moved to Bombay with his mother. Incidentally, the artist was expelled from this school for the controversial and pornographic graffiti he drew on its walls. Ceasing to practice Catholicism from a young age after what he perceived as hypocrisy in its preachers and practices, the visual language associated with the pomp and ceremony of the Church informed his paintings for his entire career. Souza chose specific images that he would return to often, employing them as a base for artistic expression and socioeconomic critique, taking liberal creative license when it came to fidelity to the original religious narratives.
In the present lot, a monumental work painted in 1987, Souza combines two well-known episodes from the New Testament of the Bible, the Annunciation and the Immaculate Conception. In terms of composition and palette, this large format painting seems to pay visual homage to two paintings by the Spanish Renaissance painter El Greco, who along with other artists including Leonardo da Vinci and Bartolomé Esteban Murillo painted versions of these episodes. Souza’s composite image simultaneously shows the two critical scenes in Christian theology: the Virgin Mary’s conception free from original sin and the announcement by the Archangel Gabriel that Mary was to become the mother of Jesus. Like El Greco, Souza depicts the Holy Spirit as a white dove encircled by light that hovers above. These two narratives are often confused, and while all Christians believe in the Annunciation, the Immaculate Conception is an exclusively Catholic doctrine. Souza is perhaps here using pastiche to emphasize the competing dogmas of the Church over which he was so paradoxically conflicted.
Another reason Souza turned to religious narratives in the 1980s was to illuminate them as counterpoints to science, another pillar of fascination for the artist. It was at this time that Souza became influenced by Redmond theory and the new relationship between man, science and nature it propounded. He recalled, “In 1980, in the New York Times, the Redmond theory appeared and it altered my whole view of what I had previously learnt from the greatest minds like Socrates or Plato, or whatever. The Redshift theory enlarges the universe to infinity. Mind you, even Einstein believed that the universe was finite. But the Redshift theory believes the universe is infinite. In fact, it reflects on the early concepts of Indian thought. Santya has said that nature is the sole principle. Procurity is the sole principle (sic) […] But the Redshift theory gives the measurement of the universe. It says that the universe is beginningless and endless, measuring from infinity to infinity, ubiquitously. Everywhere.” (Artist statement, S. Lal, ‘Interview with F.N. Souza – 1994', F.N. Souza, exhibition catalogue, New York, 2008, p. 12) It is perhaps possible that in creating this composite scene, Souza is further highlighting science as the new religion of the future.