78: FRANCIS NEWTON SOUZA painting Start Price USD 37,500.00 Current Price USD 48,000.00 Time Left - Bid Count 9 Buy It Now Price - Reserve Price - Start Time Sunday, May 18, 2008 End Time Sunday, May 18, 2008 Location Philadelphia, PA See more about '78: FRANCIS NEWTON SOUZA painting' Description Current Lot FRANCIS NEWTON SOUZA (indian 1924-2002) UNTITLED-HEAD Signed and dated 'Souza 1961' center right, inscribed verso 'Head/Oil on Canvass [sic] /30" x 20"' with Estate number verso 'OC-61-001' oil on canvas, unframed 30 x 20 in. (76.2 x 50.8cm) provenance: Estate of the artist. note: The Francis Newton Souza Foundation has confirmed that this work will be included in the artist's forthcoming catalogue raisonné . A certificate confirming that this work is from the Estate of F.n. Souza will be issued to the buyer. By 1961 Souza had been living in London for twelve years. During that time the diversity in his style of painting, and the manner in which he structured his compositions, had changed significantly. Although the subject matters remained familiar: women, landscapes, cityscapes, still-lifes, secular and religious figures. In his autobiographical text, Words and Lines , Souza describes how his grandmother fed his imagination with stories of tortured martyrs and saints that populate the culture of the Roman Catholic Church. Supported by the national belief in supernatural states of reality flowing from Indian religions (e.g., Hinduism), which Souza bumped against in his everyday life, until his move to London in 1949, it is almost inevitable that his mythic figures are made up of gods, hypocrites, saints, martyrs, inquisitors, and a collection of corrupt clergy. The figure in this painting cross-pollinates Souza's fertile imagination with a visual documentation of the "swinging sixties," the decade in London during which all remaining vestiges of the formality of the fifties fell away. Here, Souza has abandoned the more constrained techniques he applied to his work in the fifties; so that his brushwork reflects the laissez-faire attitude that permeated London between 1960-1969. The features of this priest are dashed off, his vestment loosely painted, and Christ's thorny wreath has been unwound and relegated to the top of the painting where it can do no harm to the dissolute figure below. And although Souza would later return to Christ's passion and his inquisitors in a more formal manner, the fellow here is clearly a product of his time, and a demonstration of Souza's ability to fully absorb the movement and current of a culture in evolution and flux. Shelley Souza is the artist's daughter and a trustee for the Francis Newton Souza Foundation. We wish to thank Shelley Souza for her assistance in cataloguing this lot. Place a Bid!