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拍品專文
“While Souza’s portraits stay within intensely personal boundaries, in his landscapes we see the opposite in effect. The Landscapes, architectonic, with their ‘cubic factors’ (a term I use to suggest plane and volume) are ultimately lyrical. There’s an unrestrained enthusiasm, a liberty in the application of color that is applied swiftly with a palette knife, creating smooth pulsating textures [...] Our emotions are guided by the effects of the vibrant color schemes that belong to a world of subconscious fantasy indicative of the fertility of Souza’s personal vision” (A. Ludwig, ‘Essay on Souza’s Aesthetics’, Souza, New Delhi, 1986, unpaginated).
Landscape painting has always been a cornerstone of Francis Newton Souza’s oeuvre, and remained at the heart of his practice throughout his illustrious career. Starting from picturesque scenes of Goa and Bombay that he painted in the 1940s, the artist would go on to paint several views inspired by the natural landscapes and manmade structures he encountered in India, Europe, and later North America.
Souza began to gain acclaim for his iconic landscapes from the mid-1950s onward, when he was living in London, and examples of works from this period have been exhibited in several institutional shows since then. The artist painted the present lot, decorated in tones of red and green, in 1963, when he was enjoying the fruits of the critical acclaim and commercial success he had finally achieved in London. This painting offers Souza's interpretation of the North London neighborhood where he lived at the time. Maximizing his use of the canvas, Souza constructs this cityscape from a series of overlapping and highly faceted geometric forms. Collapsing depth of field, he circumvents a traditional one-point perspective allowing his architectonic structures to build tightly upon each other in a highly cubistic manner. The palette he uses suggests a daytime scene, bringing together the manmade and natural while using the original color of the canvas as a light atmospheric background.
Landscape in Red is representative of a period of intense experimentation in Souza’s artistic career. His static painting style of the previous decade had evolved to become more dynamic and gestural, with the artist’s thick black outlines replaced by finer, curvilinear ones. Here, through the genre of landscape, Souza articulates this fundamental shift in his oeuvre, constructing his structures “using a mass of loops and small circles of dark paint superimposed onto broad swathes of rich color, so that although the image is never quite lost, its architectural formality dissolves into a kind of passionate dance” (E. Mullins, Souza, London, 1962, p. 30). With its warm and bright palette reminiscent of the stained glass windows the artist remembers from the Catholic churches he visited with his grandmother as a child, the landscape is whimsical yet a meaningful, concrete and rooted example of Souza’s body of work.
Landscape painting has always been a cornerstone of Francis Newton Souza’s oeuvre, and remained at the heart of his practice throughout his illustrious career. Starting from picturesque scenes of Goa and Bombay that he painted in the 1940s, the artist would go on to paint several views inspired by the natural landscapes and manmade structures he encountered in India, Europe, and later North America.
Souza began to gain acclaim for his iconic landscapes from the mid-1950s onward, when he was living in London, and examples of works from this period have been exhibited in several institutional shows since then. The artist painted the present lot, decorated in tones of red and green, in 1963, when he was enjoying the fruits of the critical acclaim and commercial success he had finally achieved in London. This painting offers Souza's interpretation of the North London neighborhood where he lived at the time. Maximizing his use of the canvas, Souza constructs this cityscape from a series of overlapping and highly faceted geometric forms. Collapsing depth of field, he circumvents a traditional one-point perspective allowing his architectonic structures to build tightly upon each other in a highly cubistic manner. The palette he uses suggests a daytime scene, bringing together the manmade and natural while using the original color of the canvas as a light atmospheric background.
Landscape in Red is representative of a period of intense experimentation in Souza’s artistic career. His static painting style of the previous decade had evolved to become more dynamic and gestural, with the artist’s thick black outlines replaced by finer, curvilinear ones. Here, through the genre of landscape, Souza articulates this fundamental shift in his oeuvre, constructing his structures “using a mass of loops and small circles of dark paint superimposed onto broad swathes of rich color, so that although the image is never quite lost, its architectural formality dissolves into a kind of passionate dance” (E. Mullins, Souza, London, 1962, p. 30). With its warm and bright palette reminiscent of the stained glass windows the artist remembers from the Catholic churches he visited with his grandmother as a child, the landscape is whimsical yet a meaningful, concrete and rooted example of Souza’s body of work.