Landscape

Francis Newton Souza’s series of black paintings represent a brief but profound departure within his oeuvre. This series, which the artist worked on only in 1964-65, culminated in an exhibition at Grosvenor Gallery, London, in 1966, titled Black Art and Other Paintings, shocking what he saw as a largely conservative art establishment there. Differing critical views on Souza’s source of inspiration for these works have suggested that the artist was influenced by Francisco de Goya's Pinturas Negras and the monochromatic works of conceptual artist Yves Klein, which he most likely encountered when Klein was exhibiting at Galerie Iris Clert, Paris, where he showed his work through the 1950s and 60s.

Souza used black to explore his favorite themes, including nudes, portraits, religious scenes and landscapes. In this large, vertically formatted cityscape, the artist deliberately builds up the surface with thick, dark paint, creating a relief-like texture that borders on the sculptural. The genre of landscape was of particular interest to Souza, and his investigations in black allowed him to further explore the relationship between the ominous and sublime aspects of nature, as well as the dynamic ties that he believed connected nature, man and God.

Here, “the substance is black, not the smooth black of pure sensation, but a very palpable black, its solidity created by thick brush strokes in different directions, and by a considerable range of tones according to the paint's direction in relation to the light” (D. Duerden, ‘F.N. Souza’, The Arts Review, London, 14 May 1966, p. 215).