PROPERTY FROM THE COLLECTION OF MR. K.B. GOEL, ART CRITIC: Five chemical works by Francis Newton Souza from the Private Collection of the distinguished art critic K.B. Goel Lots 276-280

Provenance: The property of Dr. Premlata Goel, widow of the distinguished art critic, K.B. Goel; Gifted by Souza to his close friend, the art critic, K.B. Goel (1930 - 2018).

Francis Newton Souza (Indian, 1924-2002), Untitled, Head, signed and dated upper left 'Souza 93', Chemical work on magazine paper, mounted, glazed and framed, 21.5 x 28.5 cm.

Provenance: The private collection of Dr. Premlata Goel, widow of the distinguished art critic K.B. Goel (1930-2018) to whom this work was gifted by the artist in the mid 1980s.

'Souza is famous for his inflammatory treatment of heads. The iconography is morbidly personal, the distortion grotesque to the point of a neurotic edge; the image proper shows mannerisms played to the dark labyrinth of the psyche, K.B. Goel, 1990. 

Francis Newton Souza developed a technique of chemically altering images later in his career, which he called chemical alterations or chemical drawings. Using this technique, he would draw over glossy pages of magazines that he would bleach out using chemicals in an attempt to make a connection between the magazine and his very own scribbling over it. The process was not only creatively satisfying but also provided some respite from the execution of a full-blown work.

Souza created many heads during the course of his career: 'I have created a new kind of face [...] I have drawn the physiognomy way beyond Picasso, in completely new terms. And I am still a figurative painter [...] He stumped them and the whole of the western world into a shambles. When you examine the face, the morphology, I am the only artist who has taken it a step further'. (Artist statement, Yashodhara Dalmia, The Making of Modern Indian Art: The Progressives, New Delhi, 2001, p. 94).

'If he was creating monsters, probably no one would be troubled; but because his images are clearly intended to be human, one is compelled to ask why his faces have eyes high up in the forehead, or else scattered in profusion all over the face; why he paints the mouths that stretch like hair combs across the face, and limbs that branch out like thistles. Souza’s imagery is not a surrealist vision- a self-conscious aesthetic shock- so much as a spontaneous re-creation of the world as he has seen it, distilled in the mind by a host of private experiences and associations'. (Edwin Mullins, Souza, London: Anthony Blond Publishers, 1962, p. 39).

See also Shruti Parthasarathy ed., K.B. Goel, Critical Writings on Art, 1957–1998, Tulika Books, 2019

Many thanks to Simon Brandenburger, a friend of the Goel family, for his contribution to this entry