Page 95 - Eye of the beholder

FRANCIS NEWTON SOUZA [1924-2002] A TORTURED SOUL
Post-Independence India’s modernism was given a creative thrust by a Collective known as Progressive Artists Group founded in 1947 in Bombay by Francis Newton Souza. The manifesto of this Group was penned by Souza, which reflected his radical dynamism, and as an artist who painted what his soul firmly believed and what he felt and thought should be his art, without catering to any whims and demands of public, community or the proletariat. The PAG group included besides Souza five core members as Maqbool Fida Husain, Syed Haider Raza, Krishna Hawalji Ara, Sadanand Bakre Hari Ambadas Gade. Bakre was a sculptor and Gade an abstractionist.
The main reason and objective behind this organization of likeminded artists was to evolve a visual language that would have no resonance to nationalist art and its subject matter would be the contemporary reality. Souza exhorted the artists to hold independent shows and develop a visual aesthetic that would blend the styles of path breaking avant-garde artists of Europe with Indian tradition. It was to claim a space for these radicals to marginalize academic naturalism that had become popular not only with the selectors of the Bombay Art Society but also among the public consciousness. It was Souza who had plotted and publicized the manifesto, as well as the first artist to leave the group to travel abroad.
Souza a maverick avant garde artist possessed a raw and eccentric genius. His vision was bold and dynamic that aided in shaping the contours of modernity in post independent India within the Post-Colonial context through Progressive Artists Group that he headed. An insightful intellectual, creative genius and versatile artist his perceptive and unorthodox writings and astute judicial readings from art history, poetry, philosophy, the sciences and psychology inspired his early works and continued to dominate later in his development of the visual language and personal iconography.
Souza born in the village of Saligao in 1924, in North Goa belonged to a Roman Catholic family. He lost his father when he was three months old and after spending a few idyllic years in Goa, he moved to Bombay with his mother who took p a job of a dress maker. Despite the fact that he did not stay long in Goa, the young impressionable years cast a deep shadow of influence and inspiration that played a key role in shaping Souza’s early formulation of art. His early years spent here had influenced his young imagination, which was particularly derived from the Roman Catholic Church, its grand architecture and the splendour of its services. These images stayed with him. Christian iconography as Christ on the Cross, His trials relived by the saints and martyrs were the varied stories his grandmother had narrated to him extended later as a leitmotif of his imagination in the form of rebellion in his work.
In Bombay he joined J.J. School of Art in 1940. The School boasted in having a reputation of English principals, claiming affiliation with the Royal Academy of Great Britain. The curriculum consisted of drawing from plaster casts of antiques, portrait paintings, studies from the nude model and occasional field trips to encourage students to paint genre pictures as fisher folks and the likes. At this time “Indian Style” painting in the tradition of Santiniketan was also introduced. Souza was the prize student of the art school where the eccentricity of his
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