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拍品专文
London is a huge city, metropolis, megalopolis. It is so vast that it contains within it towns and cities, such as Camden Town, and White City! […] But when I actually got lost in its labyrinthine topography, I joked about the hopelessness of finding my way about, in spite of reading everything on it from the article on ‘London’ in the Encyclopaedia Britannica to Jack London!
- F. N. Souza, 1950
Francis Newton Souza moved to London in 1949. The city that welcomed the artist had been ravaged by World War II, bearing both the physical scars of the cost of victory and the psychological scars left on its population. With food shortages and rationing commonplace, Souza struggled in poverty for several years before gaining any significant success as a painter.
Following this bleak start, the mid-1950s proved to be a truly transformative period for Souza. After spending several hard years struggling to make a name for himself in London and support his young family, Souza was awarded a grant to study and paint in Paris in 1952. Joining his friends and fellow artists Sayed Haider Raza and Akbar Padamsee there, Souza was able to establish several important relationships with gallerists and dealers in Paris, including Raymond Creuze and, later, Iris Clert. By 1954, Souza’s works had been exhibited in group and solo shows at Galerie St. Placide and Galerie Raymond Creuze in Paris, Galerie Palette in Zurich and ISMEO in Rome, culminating in the inclusion of several works at the prestigious Venice Biennale that year. Despite this growing exposure, Souza still remained on the verge of poverty in 1954, and even considering returning to India.
It is therefore difficult to overstate the significance of 1955 in Souza’s career. It was this year that his achievements as a writer and painter converged, propelling him to commercial and critical success. The publication of ‘Nirvana of a Maggot’ in Encounter, which was co-edited by his friend, the poet Stephen Spender, brought him to the attention of London’s literary community, while his sell-out exhibition at Gallery One secured the artistic recognition that had eluded him since his arrival in the city six years earlier. Together, these events moved Souza from near poverty and the prospect of leaving London to a new and increasingly prominent position within the city’s cultural circles. As Souza later recalled, “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 in his gallery, Gallery One, in 1955. I made a good bit of money from subsequent shows in the following years” (Artist’s statement, Arts Review, 14 May 1966). The present lot, Building in Trafalgar Square was painted at precisely this moment of transition.
Souza’s work began to win him plaudits and patrons, as well as acclaim from key art critics of the time. David Sylvester likened the expressionistic, grotesque nature of Souza’s work to that of Graham Sutherland and Francis Bacon, with whom he exhibited at the time. The artist’s landmark first exhibition also drew praise from the renowned art critic John Berger, who devoted an entire article to the exhibition in The New Statesman and Nation. In the years that followed, other well-known critics, including Andrew Forge and George Butcher also wrote about the artist. Souza would hold several successful exhibitions with Gallery One over the next decade, during which the gallery moved to more impressive premises on D’Arblay Street in Soho.
In his glowing review, Berger wrote, “One can of course avoid the whole problem of what his work means by explaining its entire appeal in formal terms. His use of engraved lines, graffito–like, to enrich the surface of his paint, his sense of pattern tending towards the effect of dark brocaded silks […] what about his Byzantine-looking towns and his cubist analysis of objects? […] If I try to define what moves me, I come to the conclusion that it is the yielding in the works of the hieratic to the banal, and vice versa” (J. Berger, ‘An Indian Painter,’ The New Statesman and Nation, vol. 49, no. 1251, 26 February 1955).
All these observations come to bear in Building in Trafalgar Square. The browns, reds, pinks and greens of the massive buildings glow against the inky blue sky like stained-glass windows. Thick black, graffiti-like lines are etched deep into the painted surface, delineating each window, gable and cornice beneath the starless sky. As Berger wrote, “The colors he uses are dark and rich and his forms are usually bound by heavy outlines” (J. Berger, Ibid., 26 February 1955). Interestingly, here Souza does not paint the teeming ‘megalopolis’ he described five years earlier, but a Byzantine monolith, which can perhaps be read as a mausoleum to empire. Taking familiar urban architecture as his starting point, Souza gives it a monumental, pseudo-sacred quality.
In Building in Trafalgar Square, Souza was not simply assimilating into the London art scene. As a Goan artist who had lived under both Portuguese and British colonial rule, he reimagined a symbolic center of British power through his own visual vocabulary. In this impressive cityscape, the human figure is conspicuously absent, and the scene seems the antithesis of the hustle and bustle of Bombay he left behind in 1949. Souza also excludes the crowds, traffic, fountains and the instantly recognizable Nelson’s Column from this representation of Trafalgar Square, all quintessentially associated with this iconic site in London, often seen as the heart of the British Empire. Architectural structures alone occupy the panoramic format the artist chooses here.
Trafalgar Square was only a short walk from Gallery One and would undoubtedly have been an all-too-familiar site for Souza in 1955. The title of the work plays on whether ‘Building’ refers to a specific structure or to the act of construction. Perhaps it is Souza who is the builder here. Do these thick black lines and totemic forms, glistening with his trademark Byzantine brilliance, constitute a blueprint for the British capital following the war?
Building in Trafalgar Square represents Souza’s moment of arrival on the London art scene. Painted in 1955, it dates from perhaps the most pivotal year of his career, when he gained the recognition and acclaim he long craved, helping to ensure his position as one of the most celebrated artists in the city for more than a decade, before his departure for New York in 1967. It is perhaps for this reason that the artist kept this painting in his personal collection for most of his life, till it was exhibited in 1998 in New York.
- F. N. Souza, 1950
Francis Newton Souza moved to London in 1949. The city that welcomed the artist had been ravaged by World War II, bearing both the physical scars of the cost of victory and the psychological scars left on its population. With food shortages and rationing commonplace, Souza struggled in poverty for several years before gaining any significant success as a painter.
Following this bleak start, the mid-1950s proved to be a truly transformative period for Souza. After spending several hard years struggling to make a name for himself in London and support his young family, Souza was awarded a grant to study and paint in Paris in 1952. Joining his friends and fellow artists Sayed Haider Raza and Akbar Padamsee there, Souza was able to establish several important relationships with gallerists and dealers in Paris, including Raymond Creuze and, later, Iris Clert. By 1954, Souza’s works had been exhibited in group and solo shows at Galerie St. Placide and Galerie Raymond Creuze in Paris, Galerie Palette in Zurich and ISMEO in Rome, culminating in the inclusion of several works at the prestigious Venice Biennale that year. Despite this growing exposure, Souza still remained on the verge of poverty in 1954, and even considering returning to India.
It is therefore difficult to overstate the significance of 1955 in Souza’s career. It was this year that his achievements as a writer and painter converged, propelling him to commercial and critical success. The publication of ‘Nirvana of a Maggot’ in Encounter, which was co-edited by his friend, the poet Stephen Spender, brought him to the attention of London’s literary community, while his sell-out exhibition at Gallery One secured the artistic recognition that had eluded him since his arrival in the city six years earlier. Together, these events moved Souza from near poverty and the prospect of leaving London to a new and increasingly prominent position within the city’s cultural circles. As Souza later recalled, “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 in his gallery, Gallery One, in 1955. I made a good bit of money from subsequent shows in the following years” (Artist’s statement, Arts Review, 14 May 1966). The present lot, Building in Trafalgar Square was painted at precisely this moment of transition.
Souza’s work began to win him plaudits and patrons, as well as acclaim from key art critics of the time. David Sylvester likened the expressionistic, grotesque nature of Souza’s work to that of Graham Sutherland and Francis Bacon, with whom he exhibited at the time. The artist’s landmark first exhibition also drew praise from the renowned art critic John Berger, who devoted an entire article to the exhibition in The New Statesman and Nation. In the years that followed, other well-known critics, including Andrew Forge and George Butcher also wrote about the artist. Souza would hold several successful exhibitions with Gallery One over the next decade, during which the gallery moved to more impressive premises on D’Arblay Street in Soho.
In his glowing review, Berger wrote, “One can of course avoid the whole problem of what his work means by explaining its entire appeal in formal terms. His use of engraved lines, graffito–like, to enrich the surface of his paint, his sense of pattern tending towards the effect of dark brocaded silks […] what about his Byzantine-looking towns and his cubist analysis of objects? […] If I try to define what moves me, I come to the conclusion that it is the yielding in the works of the hieratic to the banal, and vice versa” (J. Berger, ‘An Indian Painter,’ The New Statesman and Nation, vol. 49, no. 1251, 26 February 1955).
All these observations come to bear in Building in Trafalgar Square. The browns, reds, pinks and greens of the massive buildings glow against the inky blue sky like stained-glass windows. Thick black, graffiti-like lines are etched deep into the painted surface, delineating each window, gable and cornice beneath the starless sky. As Berger wrote, “The colors he uses are dark and rich and his forms are usually bound by heavy outlines” (J. Berger, Ibid., 26 February 1955). Interestingly, here Souza does not paint the teeming ‘megalopolis’ he described five years earlier, but a Byzantine monolith, which can perhaps be read as a mausoleum to empire. Taking familiar urban architecture as his starting point, Souza gives it a monumental, pseudo-sacred quality.
In Building in Trafalgar Square, Souza was not simply assimilating into the London art scene. As a Goan artist who had lived under both Portuguese and British colonial rule, he reimagined a symbolic center of British power through his own visual vocabulary. In this impressive cityscape, the human figure is conspicuously absent, and the scene seems the antithesis of the hustle and bustle of Bombay he left behind in 1949. Souza also excludes the crowds, traffic, fountains and the instantly recognizable Nelson’s Column from this representation of Trafalgar Square, all quintessentially associated with this iconic site in London, often seen as the heart of the British Empire. Architectural structures alone occupy the panoramic format the artist chooses here.
Trafalgar Square was only a short walk from Gallery One and would undoubtedly have been an all-too-familiar site for Souza in 1955. The title of the work plays on whether ‘Building’ refers to a specific structure or to the act of construction. Perhaps it is Souza who is the builder here. Do these thick black lines and totemic forms, glistening with his trademark Byzantine brilliance, constitute a blueprint for the British capital following the war?
Building in Trafalgar Square represents Souza’s moment of arrival on the London art scene. Painted in 1955, it dates from perhaps the most pivotal year of his career, when he gained the recognition and acclaim he long craved, helping to ensure his position as one of the most celebrated artists in the city for more than a decade, before his departure for New York in 1967. It is perhaps for this reason that the artist kept this painting in his personal collection for most of his life, till it was exhibited in 1998 in New York.