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Lot Essay
I have no desire to redeem myself or anybody else because Man is by his very nature unredeemable, yet he hankers so desperately after redemption.
- F.N. Souza, 1959
Completely rejecting the Christian ideals of compassion and salvation, Francis Newton Souza saw no redemption for his fellow man, famously claiming that unlike artists of the Renaissance who painted men and women as angels, he painted men and women to show angels the true depravity of our race. The most glaring examples of this decadence and immorality, according to the artist, were members of the clergy and upper sociopolitical classes. It was the duplicitous and un-angelic ‘men of God’, however, at whom Souza, a lapsed Catholic, expressly levelled his punitive visual indictments.
This painting is part of a series of portraits of cardinals that Souza embarked on in the early 1960s, two of which were illustrated in the artist’s 1962 monograph by Edwin Mullins. Framed against what may be a doorway or window, the subject of this portrait wears a regal crimson mozetta or cape, a clear indication of his rank in the Roman Catholic Church, and rises mountain-like to occupy most of the painted surface. However, this Cardinal does not wear a skullcap or pointed biretta on his head. Much like El Greco’s Portrait of Cardinal Tavera (1609), which was painted several years after he died based on his death mask, the face of Souza’s subject is also pinched and skeletal. His head is thin and elongated, with misaligned eyes set high in the forehead, a tubular nose and extended chin.
By 1960, when Souza painted this portrait, he had become known, alongside contemporaries like Francis Bacon, as one of the figureheads of what the critic Geeta Kapur refers to as the “new tradition of the grotesque” in post war British art. In this context, Souza’s portrait may be compared to the series of terrifying images of Popes and Cardinals painted by Bacon from the 1950s onward. Like Bacon, Souza dislodges his subject from the lofty pedestal he would typically occupy, replacing his usual trappings of grandeur and divinity with very corporeal weakness and fallibility. However, where Bacon’s subjects seem to be tormented by the difficult position they occupy as the appointed messengers of God, Souza depicts his subjects as tormentors themselves. In this portrait, the artist does not hold back his contempt for organized religion and its representatives, remaining committed to his mission to hold a mirror up to human society and show how corrupt and debauched it had become in the wake of the Second World War.
- F.N. Souza, 1959
Completely rejecting the Christian ideals of compassion and salvation, Francis Newton Souza saw no redemption for his fellow man, famously claiming that unlike artists of the Renaissance who painted men and women as angels, he painted men and women to show angels the true depravity of our race. The most glaring examples of this decadence and immorality, according to the artist, were members of the clergy and upper sociopolitical classes. It was the duplicitous and un-angelic ‘men of God’, however, at whom Souza, a lapsed Catholic, expressly levelled his punitive visual indictments.
This painting is part of a series of portraits of cardinals that Souza embarked on in the early 1960s, two of which were illustrated in the artist’s 1962 monograph by Edwin Mullins. Framed against what may be a doorway or window, the subject of this portrait wears a regal crimson mozetta or cape, a clear indication of his rank in the Roman Catholic Church, and rises mountain-like to occupy most of the painted surface. However, this Cardinal does not wear a skullcap or pointed biretta on his head. Much like El Greco’s Portrait of Cardinal Tavera (1609), which was painted several years after he died based on his death mask, the face of Souza’s subject is also pinched and skeletal. His head is thin and elongated, with misaligned eyes set high in the forehead, a tubular nose and extended chin.
By 1960, when Souza painted this portrait, he had become known, alongside contemporaries like Francis Bacon, as one of the figureheads of what the critic Geeta Kapur refers to as the “new tradition of the grotesque” in post war British art. In this context, Souza’s portrait may be compared to the series of terrifying images of Popes and Cardinals painted by Bacon from the 1950s onward. Like Bacon, Souza dislodges his subject from the lofty pedestal he would typically occupy, replacing his usual trappings of grandeur and divinity with very corporeal weakness and fallibility. However, where Bacon’s subjects seem to be tormented by the difficult position they occupy as the appointed messengers of God, Souza depicts his subjects as tormentors themselves. In this portrait, the artist does not hold back his contempt for organized religion and its representatives, remaining committed to his mission to hold a mirror up to human society and show how corrupt and debauched it had become in the wake of the Second World War.