F. N. Souza
Founded the Progressive Artists' Group in Bombay, then left for London and painted heads like wounds.
Francis Newton Souza was born in Goa in 1924, was expelled from art school in Bombay for taking part in the Quit India movement, and founded the Progressive Artists' Group in 1947 with Raza, Husain and others. He moved to London in 1949, where Stephen Spender's championing eventually brought him success, and later to New York. The paintings are heavy black-outlined heads, crucifixions, landscapes and nudes, drawn from Goan Catholicism, Indian sculpture and European expressionism, and are frequently violent, blasphemous and sexually explicit. He died in Mumbai in 2002.
One of the pillars of the modern Indian market, set principally in Mumbai, New Delhi, London and New York, and among the most forged names in it — provenance to a documented exhibition, a named collection or a first-hand purchase is essential and expert opinion is standard. The 1950s and 1960s London paintings lead. Souza also produced a very large body of works on paper, including the chemical alterations he called Chemical Paintings, made by dissolving printed magazine pages, which are distinctive and physically unstable.
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