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Lot Essay
Born and raised in Goa, Francis Newton Souza moved with his mother to Bombay in 1937 at the age of thirteen, enrolling first in St. Xavier’s High School and then the prestigious Sir J.J. School of Art. However, Souza’s rebellious personality clashed with the strict Jesuit education system and then the formal teaching methods at the art school, which remained heavily influenced by colonial British styles. As a result, he was expelled from both institutions. These formative years proved decisive in shaping the artist’s career and are fundamental to understanding Souza’s iconography today. Edwin Mullins, who published the first monograph on the artist in 1962, succinctly captures this complex background, writing, “An Indian painter, brought up a strict Roman Catholic under Portuguese colonial rule, later a member of the Communist Party and now living in London: these are the barest details about one of the most gifted and original modern artists. Those writers on art who even today look upon all new painting as the result of age-old cultural roots, must be rather baffled by such a history, for it bears witness to a great number of contradictory influences which make nonsense of conventional ideas of tradition” (E. Mullins, Souza, London, 1962, p. 5).
Many of these influences and traditions are evident in Untitled (Woman and Mirror), painted in 1952, only three years after Souza first arrived in London. His early encounters with European art in the various museums he visited sparked the beginning of a unique synthesis of Western Modernism and classical Indian art in his work. His paintings from the late 1940s, including another on the same theme titled Nude in Front of a Mirror (1949), overtly reference South Indian bronzes and the temple sculptures of Mathura and Khajuraho. After being exposed to them during a visit to an exhibition in Delhi in 1948, he believed them to be the finest examples of India’s artistic heritage. As the critic Yashodhara Dalmia notes, “Souza’s early works, which were inadvertently imbibing these influences, were also incorporating the ‘Primitive’ via the mediation of the West. In reclaiming the Primitive, Souza was virtually reinventing his own art, and that is where his strength lay” (Y. Dalmia, The Making of Modern Indian Art: The Progressives, New Delhi, 2001, p. 98).
Untitled (Woman and Mirror), painted in 1952, adds a further element, displaying the profound influence of Souza’s firsthand encounters with European art, from the Old Masters to modernist painting. Unlike the female figures that would soon populate his oeuvre, the subject of this painting is neither hyper-sexualized nor grotesquely disfigured. Instead, this solemn portrait presents an unclothed, unidentified woman, standing before a partially foreshortened mirror on the wall. In a bold, sculptural form, the robust figure stands in a frontal pose. Her form is rendered in rich impasto, recalling the high-breasted figures of Mathura sculpture, while the playful placement of her arms – one crossed, the other lifting her pinned-up hair – bears a closer resemblance to Manet’s Olympia (1863). The pinned hair became characteristic of Souza’s early depictions of women and would be included in his some of his most iconic paintings including Birth (1955).
In Western art, the motif of the mirror has long been associated with themes of vanity, vanitas and desire, as well as truth, reality and deception. Souza, well-versed in art history, would undoubtedly have seen Van Eyck’s Arnolfini Portrait (1434), on permanent display at the National Gallery in London. He would also have been aware of Picasso’s iconic Girl Before a Mirror (1932). Drawing upon this rich visual culture, Souza subverts the tradition in his own sardonic manner – the mirror in the present painting is neither clearly behind or in front of the nude subject, nor does it cast any reflection.
This painting stands as an early example of Souza’s ability to combine multiple visual traditions from the East and the West into his own distinctive visual vocabulary. Created in the lean years before he won critical and commercial acclaim and was accepted into British artistic and literary circles, Woman and Mirror predates the artist’s first solo exhibition at Gallery One, which formally announced his arrival on the London art scene.
Many of these influences and traditions are evident in Untitled (Woman and Mirror), painted in 1952, only three years after Souza first arrived in London. His early encounters with European art in the various museums he visited sparked the beginning of a unique synthesis of Western Modernism and classical Indian art in his work. His paintings from the late 1940s, including another on the same theme titled Nude in Front of a Mirror (1949), overtly reference South Indian bronzes and the temple sculptures of Mathura and Khajuraho. After being exposed to them during a visit to an exhibition in Delhi in 1948, he believed them to be the finest examples of India’s artistic heritage. As the critic Yashodhara Dalmia notes, “Souza’s early works, which were inadvertently imbibing these influences, were also incorporating the ‘Primitive’ via the mediation of the West. In reclaiming the Primitive, Souza was virtually reinventing his own art, and that is where his strength lay” (Y. Dalmia, The Making of Modern Indian Art: The Progressives, New Delhi, 2001, p. 98).
Untitled (Woman and Mirror), painted in 1952, adds a further element, displaying the profound influence of Souza’s firsthand encounters with European art, from the Old Masters to modernist painting. Unlike the female figures that would soon populate his oeuvre, the subject of this painting is neither hyper-sexualized nor grotesquely disfigured. Instead, this solemn portrait presents an unclothed, unidentified woman, standing before a partially foreshortened mirror on the wall. In a bold, sculptural form, the robust figure stands in a frontal pose. Her form is rendered in rich impasto, recalling the high-breasted figures of Mathura sculpture, while the playful placement of her arms – one crossed, the other lifting her pinned-up hair – bears a closer resemblance to Manet’s Olympia (1863). The pinned hair became characteristic of Souza’s early depictions of women and would be included in his some of his most iconic paintings including Birth (1955).
In Western art, the motif of the mirror has long been associated with themes of vanity, vanitas and desire, as well as truth, reality and deception. Souza, well-versed in art history, would undoubtedly have seen Van Eyck’s Arnolfini Portrait (1434), on permanent display at the National Gallery in London. He would also have been aware of Picasso’s iconic Girl Before a Mirror (1932). Drawing upon this rich visual culture, Souza subverts the tradition in his own sardonic manner – the mirror in the present painting is neither clearly behind or in front of the nude subject, nor does it cast any reflection.
This painting stands as an early example of Souza’s ability to combine multiple visual traditions from the East and the West into his own distinctive visual vocabulary. Created in the lean years before he won critical and commercial acclaim and was accepted into British artistic and literary circles, Woman and Mirror predates the artist’s first solo exhibition at Gallery One, which formally announced his arrival on the London art scene.