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Lot Essay
He is one of the most remarkable young artists of India, not as an accomplished master who already has found his own style, but as an experimenter of an intensity rare in this country [...] always provoking and trying out new techniques and new interpretations [...] Whatever Francis Newton’s final style may be, in whatever manner it will be integrated into the all-Indian tradition, his contribution will be an intensity and a fierce fire which the soft escapism of modern Indian art has generally missed [...] From where he is fetching his techniques, does not matter. For all real art starts only where an artist ceases to follow anybody, and dissolves all those lessons in the fire of his own vision.
- Hermann Goetz, 1949
Originally named just Newton, Francis Newton Souza moved from his native Goa to Bombay with his widowed mother Lilia Mary Antunes as a teenager. Bombay, however, proved a struggle for the small family, with Lilia barely making ends meet through her dressmaking, and Newton contracting smallpox, a disease which was commonly fatal at the time. A devout Catholic, Lilia prayed to St. Francis Xavier, the patron saint of Goa, for her son’s survival, pledging that should he recover, he would devote his life to the Church and adopt Francis as his Christian name. While Souza did fortuitously recover, he had very different and more rebellious ambitions. Lilia enrolled him in St. Francis Xavier’s Jesuit School, only for him to be expelled for among other transgressions, adorning the school bathrooms with pornographic graffiti.
Instead of joining the Church, Souza enrolled in the Sir J.J. School of Art in 1940. Although he found the classes there instructive, particularly on the fundamentals of drawing and painting from anatomy to still life, Souza soon became frustrated with their limited and prescriptive scope, which focused on the aesthetics of an outdated academic realism and European art of the nineteenth century. The young student became increasingly influenced by art and politics outside his formal education. The arrival of a group of Jewish émigrés from war ravaged Europe, including the Austrian art teacher and painter Walter Langhammer, German art critic, Rudolf Von Leyden and Austrian collector Emanuel Schlesinger, played a critical role in Souza’s artistic development during this period. Langhammer’s Bombay apartment became a meeting place where young artists learned of developments in modern art in Europe, and pored over reproductions of the works that represented new directions and movements in the international art world. Souza’s desire for a more avant garde art colored his politics as well. He became passionately revolutionary in his views, and was ultimately expelled from art school as well for his role in protests against its British Director, Charles Gerrard during the Quit India movement.
The artist’s first biographer, Edwin Mullins describes this highly politicized period for the artist, noting that Souza was becoming “Increasingly vexed by the polite inertia of Bombay society, with its borrowed aesthetic values and its indifference to the condition of India” (E. Mullins, Souza, London, 1962, p. 17). Many of the works Souza created after his expulsion from art school, such as Indian Family and Family, are characterized by their unashamed propaganda and social realism. In fact, the overt socialist overtones in his art drew him criticism at the time for allowing politics to dominate his aesthetic. Whereas many of these works depicted figures from India's impoverished proletariat, the present lot, titled View From Crawford Market, Bombay, is an exquisite aberration in this body of work.
Here, Souza chooses to return to the genre of landscape, and this idyllic and inviting scene is a welcome tonic to the harsh social realities that so affected the artist. Painted in 1946, shortly after he returned from a stint in Goa, the influence of the warm rural landscape of his native land is clear in this picture. Using the playful and lyrical style that characterized his watercolor and gouache scenes of Goa and its people, this painting may be one of the only examples of a work in which Souza treats the bustling metropolis of Bombay with the same romanticism.
Unlike many of Souza’s later landscapes, the present lot depicts a very specific locus, the view from his family home in the well-known neighborhood around Crawford Market in Bombay. Completed in 1869, the city's most famous wholesale market was named after Arthur Crawford, the first Municipal Commissioner of Bombay. Today, its imposing Victorian building remains an important landmark in the city, but has been renamed to honor the social reformer, Jyotirao Phule. While Souza's formal composition is naturalistic in its rendering of his view of this structure, one which he also documented in black and white photographs that have been preserved in his scrapbooks, his painterly technique and fauvist use of a bright, warm palette is quite the opposite. A rich network of impasto brushstrokes in green, blue, red, yellow and orange covers every inch of the surface in a riot of color. The architectural elements act as a formal foil to the wonderfully wild foliage below and the effervescent sky above.
The sky in particular bears hallmarks of European masterpieces such as Vincent Van Gogh’s iconic Starry Night, from 1889, or the night skies Marc Chagall painted several decades later. The swirling splashes of color in a sky that could represent either day or night appear like fireworks exploding overhead. View From Crawford Market suggests that Souza must have seen color reproductions of such works through Langhammer or his émigré contemporaries, as it is unquestionably the most European example of work from this early phase of his artistic career.
View From Crawford Market was painted when Souza was only twenty two years old and is one of the earliest works by the artist to come to the market. Painted in 1946, this seminal landscape marks a critical, transformative moment in Souza's life and career, after his first exhibitions at the Bombay Art Society and Chemould Frames, culminating the following year with him co-founding the avant garde Progressive Artists’ Group. A few years later, in 1949, Souza severed his association with the Communist Party of India, explaining that it was because they “told me to paint in this way and that. I was estranged from many cliques who wanted me to paint what would please them. I don't believe that a true artist paints for coteries or for the proletariat. I believe with all my soul that he paints solely for himself” (Artist statement, Words and Lines, London, 1959, p. 10). This jewel of a painting reveals Souza’s capacity for calm creativity, stepping outside his comfort zone as political rebel and enfant terrible of modern Indian art, to produce what is unquestionably a masterpiece in his oeuvre.
- Hermann Goetz, 1949
Originally named just Newton, Francis Newton Souza moved from his native Goa to Bombay with his widowed mother Lilia Mary Antunes as a teenager. Bombay, however, proved a struggle for the small family, with Lilia barely making ends meet through her dressmaking, and Newton contracting smallpox, a disease which was commonly fatal at the time. A devout Catholic, Lilia prayed to St. Francis Xavier, the patron saint of Goa, for her son’s survival, pledging that should he recover, he would devote his life to the Church and adopt Francis as his Christian name. While Souza did fortuitously recover, he had very different and more rebellious ambitions. Lilia enrolled him in St. Francis Xavier’s Jesuit School, only for him to be expelled for among other transgressions, adorning the school bathrooms with pornographic graffiti.
Instead of joining the Church, Souza enrolled in the Sir J.J. School of Art in 1940. Although he found the classes there instructive, particularly on the fundamentals of drawing and painting from anatomy to still life, Souza soon became frustrated with their limited and prescriptive scope, which focused on the aesthetics of an outdated academic realism and European art of the nineteenth century. The young student became increasingly influenced by art and politics outside his formal education. The arrival of a group of Jewish émigrés from war ravaged Europe, including the Austrian art teacher and painter Walter Langhammer, German art critic, Rudolf Von Leyden and Austrian collector Emanuel Schlesinger, played a critical role in Souza’s artistic development during this period. Langhammer’s Bombay apartment became a meeting place where young artists learned of developments in modern art in Europe, and pored over reproductions of the works that represented new directions and movements in the international art world. Souza’s desire for a more avant garde art colored his politics as well. He became passionately revolutionary in his views, and was ultimately expelled from art school as well for his role in protests against its British Director, Charles Gerrard during the Quit India movement.
The artist’s first biographer, Edwin Mullins describes this highly politicized period for the artist, noting that Souza was becoming “Increasingly vexed by the polite inertia of Bombay society, with its borrowed aesthetic values and its indifference to the condition of India” (E. Mullins, Souza, London, 1962, p. 17). Many of the works Souza created after his expulsion from art school, such as Indian Family and Family, are characterized by their unashamed propaganda and social realism. In fact, the overt socialist overtones in his art drew him criticism at the time for allowing politics to dominate his aesthetic. Whereas many of these works depicted figures from India's impoverished proletariat, the present lot, titled View From Crawford Market, Bombay, is an exquisite aberration in this body of work.
Here, Souza chooses to return to the genre of landscape, and this idyllic and inviting scene is a welcome tonic to the harsh social realities that so affected the artist. Painted in 1946, shortly after he returned from a stint in Goa, the influence of the warm rural landscape of his native land is clear in this picture. Using the playful and lyrical style that characterized his watercolor and gouache scenes of Goa and its people, this painting may be one of the only examples of a work in which Souza treats the bustling metropolis of Bombay with the same romanticism.
Unlike many of Souza’s later landscapes, the present lot depicts a very specific locus, the view from his family home in the well-known neighborhood around Crawford Market in Bombay. Completed in 1869, the city's most famous wholesale market was named after Arthur Crawford, the first Municipal Commissioner of Bombay. Today, its imposing Victorian building remains an important landmark in the city, but has been renamed to honor the social reformer, Jyotirao Phule. While Souza's formal composition is naturalistic in its rendering of his view of this structure, one which he also documented in black and white photographs that have been preserved in his scrapbooks, his painterly technique and fauvist use of a bright, warm palette is quite the opposite. A rich network of impasto brushstrokes in green, blue, red, yellow and orange covers every inch of the surface in a riot of color. The architectural elements act as a formal foil to the wonderfully wild foliage below and the effervescent sky above.
The sky in particular bears hallmarks of European masterpieces such as Vincent Van Gogh’s iconic Starry Night, from 1889, or the night skies Marc Chagall painted several decades later. The swirling splashes of color in a sky that could represent either day or night appear like fireworks exploding overhead. View From Crawford Market suggests that Souza must have seen color reproductions of such works through Langhammer or his émigré contemporaries, as it is unquestionably the most European example of work from this early phase of his artistic career.
View From Crawford Market was painted when Souza was only twenty two years old and is one of the earliest works by the artist to come to the market. Painted in 1946, this seminal landscape marks a critical, transformative moment in Souza's life and career, after his first exhibitions at the Bombay Art Society and Chemould Frames, culminating the following year with him co-founding the avant garde Progressive Artists’ Group. A few years later, in 1949, Souza severed his association with the Communist Party of India, explaining that it was because they “told me to paint in this way and that. I was estranged from many cliques who wanted me to paint what would please them. I don't believe that a true artist paints for coteries or for the proletariat. I believe with all my soul that he paints solely for himself” (Artist statement, Words and Lines, London, 1959, p. 10). This jewel of a painting reveals Souza’s capacity for calm creativity, stepping outside his comfort zone as political rebel and enfant terrible of modern Indian art, to produce what is unquestionably a masterpiece in his oeuvre.