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拍品专文
Today my art rings with an apocalyptic message, with holocaust, thalidomide and the vision that man’s own inventive evil may transform him into a monster
F.N. Souza, 1963
Born in the Portuguese colony of Goa in 1924, Francis Newton Souza grew up in a Roman Catholic community, whose beliefs and practices deeply affected his work throughout his extensive career. Although at first impressed by the rituals and representatives of the Catholic faith and awed by their opulence, Souza eventually noticed a profound hypocrisy at the heart of these practices and in the envoys who claimed absolute power through divine sanction. Completely rejecting the Christian ideals of compassion and salvation, Souza saw no redemption for 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. According to the critic Geeta Kapur, the artist was “a tormented being, exploring evil because the possibility of good teases him, eludes him, draws him out in bitter longing, a longing in which God in the shape of Christ is hardly ever absent, but in which God as absolute authority is always ridiculed” (G. Kapur, Contemporary Indian Artists, New Delhi, 1978, p. xiii).
Souza moved to London in 1949, and it was there, after a few years of struggle, that his talent and reputation were firmly cemented, winning him steady patronage. Souza’s art and writing established him as one of the most exciting and articulate voices of the post-war generation. Alongside contemporaries like Francis Bacon, he became one of the figureheads of what Kapur refers to as the ‘new tradition of the grotesque’ in British art.
By the early 1960s, Souza had truly come into his own, leading the critic Mervyn Levy to describe him in 1964 as “one of the most vigorously stimulating and committed painters of our time” ('F.N. Souza: the human and the divine', Studio International Art, April 1964, p. 134). Closely attuned to sociopolitical and scientific developments, in 1962 the artist painted a series of large, ominous works, including Resurrected Christ, The Butcher, Fall-Out Mutation, Red Curse and Hunger that addressed human suffering and destruction in the face of looming threats like nuclear war. Each of these paintings was a tour de force, leading Kapur to label Souza a “painter of doom and destruction as seen from the inside of a suicidal civilization” (Contemporary Indian Artists, New Delhi, 1978, p. 26).
Interestingly, Resurrected Christ is the most overtly religious painting of this series, drawing on past works by Souza that illustrated the Passion of Jesus Christ, and likely forerunner to an important series of large paintings on the same subject he completed over the next two years, culminating in The Human and the Divine Predicament, his celebrated first exhibition at Grosvenor Gallery in 1964. Influenced by the works of El Greco and Goya as well as the Renaissance paintings and Catalonian frescos he saw on earlier visits to Europe, Souza seems to draw on their apocalyptic visions of hell and its monstrous inhabitants in paintings like this one. Speaking about Souza and the contemporary significance of Renaissance works of art like Matthias Grünewald’s famous Isenheim Altarpiece (1512-1516), Ben Quash, professor of Christianity and the Arts at King’s College London, notes, “When that work comes into contact with the new traumas of the twentieth century [...] when that painting comes into contact with those sorts of extremes of human experience, it activates, it speaks to them, and calls forth new artistic responses, because it feels as though Christianity can still speak, even in those extremes. And I think Souza, like [Graham] Sutherland and [Francis] Bacon [...] saw the power of that Christian tradition to in some way help them articulate the traumas and the horrors of their own time” (B. Quash, “How a ‘biblically illiterate’ generation can discover Christian art”, Holy Smoke, The Spectator online, 28 July 2020, accessed July 2024).
The Resurrection refers to the final episode from the Passion narrative, where following the crucifixion and burial of Christ, he rises from the dead, leaving his sealed tomb and appearing once again to his disciples. Rather than a reflection of divinity, however, Souza’s Resurrected Christ appears mortal and anguished, following his betrayal and suffering at the hands of his fellow man. Although he stands on the lid of his closed tomb with his right arm raised in blessing, as in other traditional depictions of this subject by artists like Titian and Bellini, Souza’s Christ is deformed and mutated rather than glorious, and remains boxed into a tight and confining space. A spiky whip-like object dangles above him and the scar on his chest is accentuated, perhaps suggesting that his mocking and flagellation may persist despite the miracle of his resurrection. In his later explorations of the subject like The Flogging (1989), Souza continues to conflate various episodes from the Passion of Christ, calling them “composite” works and noting “I put all the accoutrements of Christ’s passion in one picture: crown of thorns, stigmata, cat-o’-nine tails – although I know the scourging and crucifixion followed one after the other. My painting reflects the horrors of our times by symbolically depicting the torment of Jesus Christ” (Artist statement, ‘In Defence of Art’, The Illustrated Weekly, Bombay, 26 March 1989).
Writing about Souza’s Passion paintings, art historian Gregory Salter notes that his work is “a testament to histories of violence and an enduring legacy of suffering, one that requires an emblem, a symbol that testifies to its centrality to colonial and emerging postcolonial experience while acknowledging, unflinchingly, its apparent destructive inevitability [...] Suffering in Souza is not graceful or noble or symbolic; it is a fact of the present and a legacy of the past, the both unifying and destructive presence of history in the body, and an unflinching inscription of home in these terms” (G. Salter, Art and Masculinity in Post-War Britain: Reconstructing Home, London, 2019, p. 126).
In this portrayal of Christ, with multiple eyes, barred teeth, pincer like hands and spindly, deformed legs, Souza seems to be saying that if mankind continues down the road it is on, there will be no salvation to be had. As the artist wrote a few years earlier, “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” (Artist statement, Words & Lines, London, 1959, p. 26).
F.N. Souza, 1963
Born in the Portuguese colony of Goa in 1924, Francis Newton Souza grew up in a Roman Catholic community, whose beliefs and practices deeply affected his work throughout his extensive career. Although at first impressed by the rituals and representatives of the Catholic faith and awed by their opulence, Souza eventually noticed a profound hypocrisy at the heart of these practices and in the envoys who claimed absolute power through divine sanction. Completely rejecting the Christian ideals of compassion and salvation, Souza saw no redemption for 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. According to the critic Geeta Kapur, the artist was “a tormented being, exploring evil because the possibility of good teases him, eludes him, draws him out in bitter longing, a longing in which God in the shape of Christ is hardly ever absent, but in which God as absolute authority is always ridiculed” (G. Kapur, Contemporary Indian Artists, New Delhi, 1978, p. xiii).
Souza moved to London in 1949, and it was there, after a few years of struggle, that his talent and reputation were firmly cemented, winning him steady patronage. Souza’s art and writing established him as one of the most exciting and articulate voices of the post-war generation. Alongside contemporaries like Francis Bacon, he became one of the figureheads of what Kapur refers to as the ‘new tradition of the grotesque’ in British art.
By the early 1960s, Souza had truly come into his own, leading the critic Mervyn Levy to describe him in 1964 as “one of the most vigorously stimulating and committed painters of our time” ('F.N. Souza: the human and the divine', Studio International Art, April 1964, p. 134). Closely attuned to sociopolitical and scientific developments, in 1962 the artist painted a series of large, ominous works, including Resurrected Christ, The Butcher, Fall-Out Mutation, Red Curse and Hunger that addressed human suffering and destruction in the face of looming threats like nuclear war. Each of these paintings was a tour de force, leading Kapur to label Souza a “painter of doom and destruction as seen from the inside of a suicidal civilization” (Contemporary Indian Artists, New Delhi, 1978, p. 26).
Interestingly, Resurrected Christ is the most overtly religious painting of this series, drawing on past works by Souza that illustrated the Passion of Jesus Christ, and likely forerunner to an important series of large paintings on the same subject he completed over the next two years, culminating in The Human and the Divine Predicament, his celebrated first exhibition at Grosvenor Gallery in 1964. Influenced by the works of El Greco and Goya as well as the Renaissance paintings and Catalonian frescos he saw on earlier visits to Europe, Souza seems to draw on their apocalyptic visions of hell and its monstrous inhabitants in paintings like this one. Speaking about Souza and the contemporary significance of Renaissance works of art like Matthias Grünewald’s famous Isenheim Altarpiece (1512-1516), Ben Quash, professor of Christianity and the Arts at King’s College London, notes, “When that work comes into contact with the new traumas of the twentieth century [...] when that painting comes into contact with those sorts of extremes of human experience, it activates, it speaks to them, and calls forth new artistic responses, because it feels as though Christianity can still speak, even in those extremes. And I think Souza, like [Graham] Sutherland and [Francis] Bacon [...] saw the power of that Christian tradition to in some way help them articulate the traumas and the horrors of their own time” (B. Quash, “How a ‘biblically illiterate’ generation can discover Christian art”, Holy Smoke, The Spectator online, 28 July 2020, accessed July 2024).
The Resurrection refers to the final episode from the Passion narrative, where following the crucifixion and burial of Christ, he rises from the dead, leaving his sealed tomb and appearing once again to his disciples. Rather than a reflection of divinity, however, Souza’s Resurrected Christ appears mortal and anguished, following his betrayal and suffering at the hands of his fellow man. Although he stands on the lid of his closed tomb with his right arm raised in blessing, as in other traditional depictions of this subject by artists like Titian and Bellini, Souza’s Christ is deformed and mutated rather than glorious, and remains boxed into a tight and confining space. A spiky whip-like object dangles above him and the scar on his chest is accentuated, perhaps suggesting that his mocking and flagellation may persist despite the miracle of his resurrection. In his later explorations of the subject like The Flogging (1989), Souza continues to conflate various episodes from the Passion of Christ, calling them “composite” works and noting “I put all the accoutrements of Christ’s passion in one picture: crown of thorns, stigmata, cat-o’-nine tails – although I know the scourging and crucifixion followed one after the other. My painting reflects the horrors of our times by symbolically depicting the torment of Jesus Christ” (Artist statement, ‘In Defence of Art’, The Illustrated Weekly, Bombay, 26 March 1989).
Writing about Souza’s Passion paintings, art historian Gregory Salter notes that his work is “a testament to histories of violence and an enduring legacy of suffering, one that requires an emblem, a symbol that testifies to its centrality to colonial and emerging postcolonial experience while acknowledging, unflinchingly, its apparent destructive inevitability [...] Suffering in Souza is not graceful or noble or symbolic; it is a fact of the present and a legacy of the past, the both unifying and destructive presence of history in the body, and an unflinching inscription of home in these terms” (G. Salter, Art and Masculinity in Post-War Britain: Reconstructing Home, London, 2019, p. 126).
In this portrayal of Christ, with multiple eyes, barred teeth, pincer like hands and spindly, deformed legs, Souza seems to be saying that if mankind continues down the road it is on, there will be no salvation to be had. As the artist wrote a few years earlier, “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” (Artist statement, Words & Lines, London, 1959, p. 26).