F. N. Souza valuation
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.
What a work by F. N. Souza is worth
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Bio
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.
Saligão, Encounter and Gallery One
Souza was born to Goan Catholic parents at Saligão and moved to Bombay with his mother in 1929. He was expelled from the Sir J. J. School of Art in 1945 for pulling down the Union Jack at a school ceremony, and joined the Communist Party of India before co-founding the Progressive Artists' Group. His work was shown at Burlington House in London in 1948, in an exhibition of Indian art.
Success in London came after Stephen Spender published his autobiographical essay Nirvana of a Maggot in Encounter in 1955 and introduced him to Victor Musgrave, whose Gallery One showed him that year. He published Words and Lines in 1959, John Berger wrote well of him, and Husain regarded him as a mentor.
Chemould, Birth and the move to New York
Souza's half-brother was the painter Lancelot Ribeiro. Before the art school he had been expelled from St Xavier's College in Bombay, in 1939. In 1948 his exhibition at Chemould Frames in Bombay was attacked by members of the Goan community, and complaints of obscenity to the police came before his move to London in 1949, where the Institute of Contemporary Arts included him in a show in 1954 and his exhibition at Gallery One sold out the following year.
His painting Birth, of 1955, put him on the British shortlist of five for the Guggenheim International Award in 1958. John Berger described the style as deliberately eclectic, Expressionist at heart but drawing on Art Brut and British Neo-Romanticism. He moved to New York in 1967 and later divided his time between India and the United States. His daughter Keren Souza-Kohn is a painter, and her son Solomon Souza a street artist known for his murals in the Mahane Yehuda market in Jerusalem.
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