Souza's Brush as Sword

" I want to do everything: to make others suffer, to make myself suffer. I have no desire to redeem myself or anybody else because Man is by his very nature unredeemable.” This is Francis Newton Souza, the enfant terrible and father of Indian contemporary art. Few flew in the face of traditionalism, punctured conventions, or thumbed their nose at the establishment, as did he.

His rebel spirit was developed at an early age--Souza was expelled from school as the Jesuit teachers did not appreciate his suggestive drawings on the bathroom walls; in 1947, he started the Progressive Artist's Group (PAG) together with other upcoming painters like Husain, Raza, Ara, Gade and Bakre. With the formation of this group, Souza set the stage for contemporary Indian art with the anarchic rallying cry of “Today we paint with absolute freedom for content and technique.” In 1964, at age 40, he met a 16-year-old whom he married the following year.

His most enduring themes though, revolved around his Roman Catholic background and his antagonism towards it. Some of the most moving of Souza's paintings are those which convey a spirit of awe in the presence of a divine power--a God, who is not a God of gentleness and love, but rather of suffering, vengeance. With rhetorical brush and pen, he ridiculed church dogmas, beliefs, and rituals.

Souza held on to his wry humor and a healthy skepticism of the establishment in any form. He excelled at disparaging friends, relatives, foes, art dealers and anything else that stood between him and cynicism. His life ended in several failed marriages and alienated children from the unions.

For Souza, reality was merely an infrastructure to be demolished. Although he was a figurative painter, nothing about his art is descriptive; there is no celebration of nature, no beauty in his nudes, in actuality, there is nothing romantic about his paintings. In looking at Souza's work the most important thing is not that we understand what the painting shows us, but what he shows us forces us in turn to see visions within ourselves, visions of our shared humanity. "I often try to paint a bad picture, and I bloody well succeed," he boasted.
Perhaps his worldwide popularity lies in that fact that he did what he wanted, when he wanted without social mores weighing him down. Perhaps, subconsciously, it is an attitude we would all like to have at some point in our lives, if we had the guts to take that long leap to non-conformity.