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Lot Essay
“Souza is a painter with a powerful and strange personal vision. His paintings are neither primitive nor ‘cultured’. They either move you by their stark interpretation of the visual world, or they repel you [...] He is an image-maker and not an aesthete or a theorist. These are earth paintings, and their impact lies in the artist’s power to distort and strengthen the eye’s image of this world, and to produce an effect almost shocking in its intensity” (E. Mullins, Souza, London, 1962, p. 33).
The ‘shocking intensity’ of Souza’s art that Mullins describes was a quality the artist ingeniously leveraged in his continuous engagement with what he believed was the prudish hypocrisy of the Roman Catholic faith, in which he was born and raised, and of contemporary elite society as well. According to Ebrahim Alkazi, this represented a radical broadening of the role of art as a mirror to society, reflecting its true nature rather than mere appearances. Souza’s “art is a frontal assault on all aesthetic values, past and present, and a redefinition of the role of art in life, exemplified by his own creative functioning […] A rational treatment of the theme, however radical or modern […] is dismissed as being too superficial and external to cope with experiences where the instinctual and the refined, the bestial and the spiritual are so inextricably fused that only a non- ‘aesthetic’ language, shorn of civilised niceties, can hope to portray the perverted pantomime of human relationships” (E. Alkazi, ‘Souza's Seasons in Hell’, Art Heritage, New Delhi, 1986-87, p. 74).
Among Souza’s most critical works in this genre are his portraits of ‘saints’, disfigured and defiled to express his cynicism about the Christian ideals of compassion, forgiveness and salvation and the hypocrisy of those who preached them. Here, the artist portrays Saint Stephen, known as Christianity’s protomartyr, in ecclesiastic robes ornamented at the collar. Believed to have been a deacon in Jerusalem’s early church, Saint Stephen was sentenced to death by stoning for his teachings, then considered blasphemous by the established authorities. To mark his martyrdom, he is often portrayed with stones on his head and shoulders, and Souza perhaps alludes to this tradition in the black mass that obscures part of his subject’s face. While the high-set eyes and tubular nose are typical of the artist’s figuration, here the features are additionally masked by what appear to be snakes emerging from his eyes and nose, symbolic of death and decay.
Souza adds another dimension to this 1968 portrait by irreverently dubbing it an ‘homage to Stephen Spender’. As co-founder and editor of the literary magazine Encounter, the acclaimed writer and poet gave Souza one of his first breaks in London by introducing him to Peter Watson who exhibited three of his works alongside pieces by artists like Graham Sutherland, Francis Bacon and Henry Moore at the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) in 1954, and publishing his autobiographical essay ‘Nirvana of a Maggot’ the next year. Recalling this, Souza wrote, “Had it not been for Stephen Spender, who helped me with sums of money, buying my paintings, publishing my articles [...] I could not have been able to remain dedicated to my work” (Artist statement, ‘A Fragment of Autobiography’, Words and Lines, 1959, p. 7). Painted in 1968, this portrait perhaps commemorates Spender’s resignation from Encounter in 1967, as a ‘martyr’, after finding it was being clandestinely funded by the CIA. Spender’s championing of Souza’s career continued even after the artist left London a few months later, and included inaugurating a Souza exhibition at Arts 38 as late as 1975.
The ‘shocking intensity’ of Souza’s art that Mullins describes was a quality the artist ingeniously leveraged in his continuous engagement with what he believed was the prudish hypocrisy of the Roman Catholic faith, in which he was born and raised, and of contemporary elite society as well. According to Ebrahim Alkazi, this represented a radical broadening of the role of art as a mirror to society, reflecting its true nature rather than mere appearances. Souza’s “art is a frontal assault on all aesthetic values, past and present, and a redefinition of the role of art in life, exemplified by his own creative functioning […] A rational treatment of the theme, however radical or modern […] is dismissed as being too superficial and external to cope with experiences where the instinctual and the refined, the bestial and the spiritual are so inextricably fused that only a non- ‘aesthetic’ language, shorn of civilised niceties, can hope to portray the perverted pantomime of human relationships” (E. Alkazi, ‘Souza's Seasons in Hell’, Art Heritage, New Delhi, 1986-87, p. 74).
Among Souza’s most critical works in this genre are his portraits of ‘saints’, disfigured and defiled to express his cynicism about the Christian ideals of compassion, forgiveness and salvation and the hypocrisy of those who preached them. Here, the artist portrays Saint Stephen, known as Christianity’s protomartyr, in ecclesiastic robes ornamented at the collar. Believed to have been a deacon in Jerusalem’s early church, Saint Stephen was sentenced to death by stoning for his teachings, then considered blasphemous by the established authorities. To mark his martyrdom, he is often portrayed with stones on his head and shoulders, and Souza perhaps alludes to this tradition in the black mass that obscures part of his subject’s face. While the high-set eyes and tubular nose are typical of the artist’s figuration, here the features are additionally masked by what appear to be snakes emerging from his eyes and nose, symbolic of death and decay.
Souza adds another dimension to this 1968 portrait by irreverently dubbing it an ‘homage to Stephen Spender’. As co-founder and editor of the literary magazine Encounter, the acclaimed writer and poet gave Souza one of his first breaks in London by introducing him to Peter Watson who exhibited three of his works alongside pieces by artists like Graham Sutherland, Francis Bacon and Henry Moore at the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) in 1954, and publishing his autobiographical essay ‘Nirvana of a Maggot’ the next year. Recalling this, Souza wrote, “Had it not been for Stephen Spender, who helped me with sums of money, buying my paintings, publishing my articles [...] I could not have been able to remain dedicated to my work” (Artist statement, ‘A Fragment of Autobiography’, Words and Lines, 1959, p. 7). Painted in 1968, this portrait perhaps commemorates Spender’s resignation from Encounter in 1967, as a ‘martyr’, after finding it was being clandestinely funded by the CIA. Spender’s championing of Souza’s career continued even after the artist left London a few months later, and included inaugurating a Souza exhibition at Arts 38 as late as 1975.