Introduction text by Girish Shahane 

Souza’s prose follows a trajectory similar to that of his painting. It starts off bold, clear and contrary; turns violent and beautiful, with the coiled energy of a venomous serpent; and ends bloated and rather jejune, though retaining its cleverness and a kind of honesty. An essay composed in 1948 to accompany the artist’s second solo displays more gumption than anything written since by a twenty-something Indian artist.

Souza announces his rebellion right away: his parents are Catholic, he is an atheist. He then shifts his attention to the next emblem of authority faced by a child, the education system, highlighting simultaneously his outsider status and his accomplishments as an autodidact. The note is packed with references to the history of art and politics – Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Gregorian Chant, Rouault, Shelley, Van Gogh, Ostrovsky, and so on – but not weighed down by them. Occasionally, he lapses into pretentiousness, as when he calls modern art, “an eclectic agglomeration of more oriental and less occidental graphic and glyphic arts, from the paleolithic times to the present day”. After his move to London, Souza composed a series of remarkable essays, including an autobiographical vignette titled Nirvana of a Maggot, coinciding with his peak as a painter. By the time a show of his paintings opened in Delhi in 1976, he was on an unmistakable downswing. The exhibition mostly comprised reworkings of familiar motifs: heads, crucifixions, landscapes. Where he diversified into sinuous drawings of Hindu figures like Vishnu and Radha-Krishna, the result lacked attitude and command. He published an article in the Indian and Foreign Review looking back at the show and the changed Indian scene.

In the second paragraph of the article, he recounts the tour of the exhibition undertaken by the then Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, accompanied by her daughter-in-law Sonia and her grandson Rahul. He savours the irony of his work, once the target of moralists, now apparently being fit for families. He crows about a Films Division documentary made about him, and screened before the main feature in Delhi cinema halls. But he glosses over one crucial fact: his exhibition, and Indira Gandhi’s visit, took place during the Emergency, when civil liberties in India were suspended. His sanguine view of the Indian art scene ignores this fact entirely. Looking back on his career, he concerns himself with sales and reviews of his paintings, and even more with the series of lovers his art brought him. Renoir having said almost a century earlier that he painted with his prick, Souza’s placing of his libido at the centre of his work offers little that is noteworthy. He has, in fact, turned old-school: the anarchist as establishment man. He rails, for example, against the classification of chamber pots as art. It’s no surprise that he ends with his discovery of the Bhagavad Gita.

F.N. Souza:  A Painter’s Aesthetic and Emotional Encounters

March 1976, Indian & Foreign Review

Before I begin to narrate, as best as I can, my encounters in the world of art and letters in India, Britain, France and the USA, spread over nearly three decades since the 1940s when I was a mere student in an art school in Bombay and now as a “notorious” celebrity, let me state straightaway that I am very egotistical. Adulation feeds my ego and spurs me forward to, I hope, better and greater artistic endeavors.

I loved the reception I got when my exhibition was opened in January, 1976 in New Delhi. The Prime Minister, Mrs. Gandhi found time to visit the gallery where 50 of my paintings and drawing were hanging. She came with her grandson and daughter in- law; which I thought was marvelous, that my show was fit for the family.

A “Prophet” at Home

 Then, the other night I went to see one of these corny Indian movies in New Delhi. With it, there was a documentary by the Indian films division and a ‘flash’ on the screen. “F.N. Souza, His Paintings”. Who said a prophet is not recognised in his own country? Today, if you can paint your prophecies, you are likely to see them in your local cinema.

Now, whatever I’ve created or wrote in line, colour or word, it’s autobiographical. Except for the story of my own life, I have never written a short story. I expect my life to be a long one!

I keep an extensive diary, and I know that what I have to say is far from boring because I have eliminated boredom from my life. Boredom goes with depression, I am never depressed. The secret of life is JOY and I’ve found it. As in all metropolitan cities where culture is competitive, there is a lot of “art-politics” in Delhi but, being an outsider, I can afford to be detached. Not that I cannot tackle them. When we found the progressive artists group in Bombay in 1940s, we totally destroyed whatever “art-politics” there were. At least I did.

I left India in 1949, because I wanted to enlarge my experience. I am a congenital rebel. I sailed from the docks in Bombay on to be precise 22 July that year. Of course, it was not merely a case of going “phoren” or vilayat. After the historic exhibition in 1949 of the progressive artists group of which I was the secretary which included Raza, Ara, Husain, Gade and Bakre, I was filled with a spirit of defiance. When I arrived at the Tibury docks in London on 8th August, I was astonished by the grimness of England. Here was the country that was running only a few years before an empire encircling nearly three quarters of the globe. Yet, there was no joy in it. There was rationing in Britain which, didn’t end till 1954. The people were grimed-faced after a prolong war. So this was the environment when I arrived in England. The empire had been lost; the Labour government was in power; half-baked ideas on socialism floated around; the Marshall plan with its heavy dose of U.S. aid to Europe was in operation.

Smell of Perfume

I stayed only a few months in London and crossed over the English Channel to Paris. I still have a friend there, a formal student of the art school in Bombay. We stayed at his hostel in Boulevard Montparnasse and saw all modern art shows in museums and private collection. Eventually, I joined the Ecole des Beaux art in Paris. Later Ram Kumar, Raza and Padamsee arrived and together with Laxman Pai, we had a great time discussing what the Paris school had done in relation to our own activities in the Progressive Artists Group. We were all in our twenties at the time and it wasn’t only art that was on our brain. There is a smell of perfume in the street of Paris, and it wasn’t only our brain that is excited.

After my aesthetic and emotional encounters in Paris, I returned to London. I’d been married when I was in Bombay to a girl from Goa who was half-Portuguese. She had bought the first painting I ever sold in my first one man show in 1945. Later I courted and married her in 1947. Her name is Maria Figueredo and now she runs an art gallery in London. She still owns that first painting of mine, among several others. My wife had arrived in London and we had a daughter who was born in May 1951. I had also joined the Central School of Art in London but I kept on going to Paris frequently, where I had group exhibitions with Raza and Padamsee, as well as one man show.

I had my first one-man show in London in 1955. The art situation in London at that time is pretty dull and my first one-man show created a sensation. Long reviews and all the paintings sold out. Two years before I had travelled all over France including the French Riviera, as well as all of Italy, Geneva, Siena, Florence, Venice, Rome etc. where I had a chance of studying the Italian primitives, Pierodella Francesca and the Renaissance art. This, in turn, altered my knowledge of Paris school, which again, modified my knowledge of Indian art. Indian art was certainly not merely what Vincent Smith and Coomaraswamy had thought it was. My rebellious instincts suggested more than these authorities had.

In England there were many refugees from Europe at that time. They were more friendly to us the “colouredwogs” than the “stiffed upperlipped” English natives. My first major exhibition was arranged by the late Mr. V.K. Krishna Menon, High Commissioner for India at India House in London in 1951 where I did make a few English friends who were sympathetic towards us. In 1954, I met Stephen Spender who edited Encounters, I wrote an article on Nirvana of a Maggot which was subsequently published in February issue of Encounter, 1954. This particular piece even before its publication made me a sort of mini celebrity in the intellectual circles of Soho and Victor Musgrave, a poet of himself who was the director of “gallery one” in Soho, approached me with a view of having one man show. This was held in 1955, was acclaimed by the press and was a sellout commercially.

Travels in Europe

It was at this exhibition that I met a beautiful young woman, a blonde filmstar and a stage actress and with the money I had made from my exhibition, we eloped to Paris. I left my first wife whom I had also met at my solo exhibition in Bombay and went to live with this femme fatale. We had three daughters, or “love” children as they are called, born out of wedlock.

In the course of my career, I had a contract with ‘Gallery One’ in Soho with a retainer and all expenses paid – something hardly any artist in London had, such terms being only available in Paris. I was selected as one of the five painters to represent Britain for the Guggenheim award. I also won other prizes and awards and my paintings sold as fast as I painted them. In 1956, on a visit to Paris, I met my first American collector, Harold Kovner, who bought my paintings without seeing them. He now has a collection of some 400 works in New York City. Victor Musgrove, my dealer, also managed to find me an enterprising English patron Robin Howard, who’s now an “angel” for the London dance company and had introduced Martha Graham in England.

I traveled a great deal in German, Spain, the Scandinavian countries, made a couple of visits to India in 1960 and 1963, and also again to Italy when the Italian government awarded me a scholarship. So, as you can see for a non-European painter I was astonishingly received and found no difficulty in adjustment.

Unfortunately, during these “hey day years” I started to drink and squandered everything on booze. I was almost on skid row. One night, I destroyed all my paintings in my studio. In the sober light of dawn, standing solitary in my studio, strewn with the night’s destruction of debris. I looked at my ravaged face in the mirror and asked myself “Do you want to be a famous drunkard or a famous artist?”

If you think this is too melodramatic, it is! But I decided to stop drinking, to take a cure under the aversion therapy, which is a form of ‘condition of reflex that Pavlov had tried out on dogs! And since 1960, I have never had a single drink. I am a teetotaler and I have never been happy in life without the ‘monkey’ on my back. The story of my dipsomania can be described in three sentences “A man takes a drink, the drinks takes the drinks, the drinks takes the man”. I stopped the last happening in the nick of time. Giving up cigarette smoking was even more difficult than abstaining from alcohol. When I stopped smoking because of the fear of cancer, I calculated that I’d saved over 400 pounds per year on cigarettes most of which went in offering other people.

This was 15years ago, the cost of nicotine poisoning having gone up since then, so what’s left?No booze, no fags-only sex.

In 1964, I met a beautiful girl, Barbara Zinkant. She was very blonde and blue-eyed. And she was sixteen years old. I bought a new flat and she came to live with me. In the following year, I married her, I returned to India with my bride hoping I could settle down here for good. We had planned to live in Delhi, so we returned to London to wind up things. But destiny had other plans. An American art dealer called at my studio and offered me, a contract to enable me and my wife to live in the USA. I accepted and went to live there in 1967.

I have my pad in New York ever since, though I am not an American citizen. In 1971, we had a son, Francis Patrick Souza.

Art Activity in India

It is a decade now since I visited India. The art scene has changed for the better as the museums of the modern art exhibits exemplify. It is more lively, less regional—it has become national. But unhappily, at the moment there is not much in the western art. The reason we hear more about it than there is, especially from the USA, is because they plough a lot of big money into the promotion of art. If you spend $50,000 to advertise a chamber pot as an “art work”, you can sell it for $10,000. The Americans call this motivation, in Britain there are government bodies like the arts council and the British council which promote their own “chamber pot’.

I see a lot of art activity in India. Much of it is of a very high standard. There is no doubt in my mind that Hussain is a phenomenon, Gaitonde produces super paintings of exquisite craftsmanship. There are many Indian artist who are cutting up paths for themselves in an aesthetic jungle that contains in our modern world culture, academism, impressionism, fauvism, cubism, futurism, expressionism, surrealism, constructivism, dada, action painting, abstract art, abstract expressionism, pop art, minimal art, earth art, destructive art, funk and even crap art. Now the art scene is a free for all.

I came to India in January 1976 to attend an artists camp in Goa which I had an invitation from Lalit Kala Akademi (Academy of Fine Arts) I haven’t been to India where I was born for 15years. Much of the feudal type of Christian imagery that appears in my paintings has its origin in Goa. But when I take a Christian subject, it is more to hand my paint on. Some time ago, I did a series of black paintings, with one colour, in black, or rather in achromatic, because black is not a color. Light made the markings in black visible. Recently I did a series of paintings only in white. They have never been exhibited.

My art so far is the result of my libido. It is like the plumage of male birds. These birds because of the beautiful colours of their feathers, attract their mates and build nests. Nest building is called Nidology. Through my art, I have found my partners and off- springs.

But I am still groping for aesthetic stimulation in India to enable me to decide to return here forever. Through American scholars I have discovered Bhagavad Gita, which I regard to be the greatest book ever written anywhere. It reveals itself a message of great joy. Egoism and joy with the work ethos or karmayoga – these are my trinity, my credo.

Article Courtesy: Girish Shahane and Krishen Khanna.

NOTE: Images used in the article were part of the original text.