Footnotes

Provenance
Property from a private collection, Sweden.

"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... [Picasso] stumped them and the whole of the western world into shambles. When you examine the face, the morphology, I am the only artist who has taken it a step further." (F. N. Souza quoted in Y. Dalmia, 'A Passion for the Human Figure', The Making of Modern Indian Art: The Progressives, Oxford University Press, New Delhi, 2001, p. 94).

This striking portrait, Untitled (Head of a Man), serves as a powerful example of Souza's bold and unapologetic artistic style. Painted in 1956, the piece emerged a year after Souza gained recognition as a serious artist within the London art scene of the 1950s. His breakthrough came through a chance meeting with Victor Musgrave, which led to a successful solo show at Gallery One in 1955. Souza later reflected, 'I came to this country in 1949 and lived in dire poverty for six years, until 1954. Six years of starvation, rags and cigarettes picked up from the gutters. But somehow I kept on painting and never took a job. Then a chance meeting with Victor Musgrave led to a sell-out show.' (F. N. Souza, History Lessons, No. 11: An Interview with F.N. Souza, interviewed by Barrie Sturt-Penrose, Arts Review, 28 May 2020, first published in Arts Review, 14 May 1966).

Souza, renowned for his relentless experimental approach, saw his 1950s portraits evolve into striking modernist representations, characterized by bold cross-hatching, distorted faces, and vibrant impasto layers of colour. Untitled (Head of a Man) exemplifies the development of his distinctive style during this period, a result of his fusion of influences—melding the expressionism of Rouault and Soutine with the essence of Cubism and the sculptures of classical Indian art. (A Visual History of Indian Modern Art: Volume Five, New Delhi, DAG, January – February 2015, p. 977).

Souza's fascination with the human form remained a recurring motif throughout his work, which he often rendered in a vibrant interplay of figuration and abstraction, exploring themes of desire, sexuality, and spirituality. As he described in his diary, I started using more than two eyes, numerous eyes and fingers on my paintings and drawings of human figures when I realised what it meant to have the superfluous and so not need the necessary. Why should I be sparse and parsimonious when not only this world, but worlds in space are open to me? I have everything to use at my disposal. (F. N. Souza, quoted in Notes, F N SOUZA, exhibition catalogue, Gallery One, London, 1961, p. 1, originally from the artist's diary, 9 January, 1961.).