Page 96 - Eye of the beholder

genius was already made apparent as a student. He had mastery over the academic rules and by the same token he could have been a prize painter of Bombay upper class society. However, he rejected his education, and educated himself through books and reproductions and the actual works of art that he could find access to. He was a confirmed rebel from his adolescence. During college days he became a patriot and got himself expelled. The occasion was a students’ demonstration against the anti-colonial practices of the English principal.
Souza’s process of politicization led him to Marxism, and soon after he was expelled from the art school he joined the Communist Party of India. By temperament he was a fighter, with every pang of humiliation, he felt as an individual or as a ‘native’ that roused in him to retaliate and attack. Working for the party he devised his figures according to class-type and depicted the plight of the poor. He painted these in an idiom of realism. He was only too willing to display his paintings in the working class colonies of Bombay and was hailed in the People’s Age, the party paper as a patriot and revolutionary.
In 1947, Souza initiated the Progressive Artists Group [PAG]. By the time the group became operative he had already made a name for himself by painting prolifically, exhibiting it and selling them too. Souza in initiating the group wished to give it a broad ideological orientation which he did by providing the manifesto, the publicity and the credentials for the group. But after the first exhibition held in 1949 he decided to leave the country and left for London. Souza as an angry expatriate adopted in true style and added the appropriate myths to his emigration by laying the claims that he was driven out of the country for lack of appreciation.
Souza undeniably carved a trajectory with avowed frankness and forthrightness. His position within modern Indian art is that of a daring and courageous pioneer when he said, “Our art has evolved over the years of its own volition, out of our own balls and brains”. His abrasive personality, forthright frankness and torturous emotions manifested his works revealing not a normal individual but one possessing an extraordinary genius who fought his lone battles and stood alone. Souza passed away in 2002 almost bankrupt.
His paintings were informed by a variety of styles that included Expressionism, Surrealism, Cubism and Primitivism, the latter particularly for his predilection towards the native folk art of Goa. The repertoire of his subject matter was still life, landscapes, human nudes and Christian iconography rendered boldly in frenzied distortion of forms. His style expressed his disdain and impatience for conventions and everyday reality of the subject matter. He had gone through this phase when as part of the communist group he had painted the proletariat and the poor fishermen, farm labourers, factory workers, destitute, prostitutes, pimps and others.
The landscapes that Souza painted were bereft of human presence and generic in character without the specification of locale whether Indian, European, English or any other, thus denying the persuasive statement of cultural identity, reflecting his bohemian state. The energy in these landscapes was equally frenzied and frenetic, made manifest through diagonal roads and streets, tall towers and other architectural elements creating a sense of enigma and mystery. His architectural motifs were in a sense metaphorical conveying authority of his intellectual artistry. The diagonal streets spell rebellion in the construction of his visual aesthetic by denying all dominant conventions. The half open doors in his landscapes symbolically reveal his introverted, pessimistic and enigmatic complex personality.
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