Souza dominates Sotheby's May auction

The spring auctions with a bang last month as Sotheby's sold more than $128 million (£69 million) worth of contemporary and post-war art, the highest total in its history.

Souza dominates Sotheby's May auction

Souza rules the roost at Sotheby's

LONDON: Francis Newton Souza ruled the roost at Sotheby's May auction of The Indian Sale here with his "Amsterdam Landscape" going for $1.175 million to a private collector.


Souza's painting fetches $1.17 mn in Sotheby's auction

History of Art Timeline at the Met

The Bombay Progressives

During the 1930s and '40s, a number of communist groups were active in the cultural arena in India. Along with theater professionals and writers, visual artists joined together under the banner of "progressive" and identified with Marxism. In Bombay in 1947, Francis Newton Souza (1924–2002), Maqbool Fida Husain (born 1915), and others formed the Progressive Artists' Group. They had leftist leanings, rejected the nationalist art of the Bengal School, and embraced international modern art practices. Over the years, Souza gained international notoriety for his erotic and religious paintings that were informed by a variety of styles, including Expressionism, Surrealism, Cubism, and Primitivism.

Metropolitan Museum Timeline

F.N. Souza at Tate Britain

Francis Newton Souza was born in the Portuguese colony of Goa in 1924, where his Roman Catholic upbringing taught him ‘to believe that the glorious eroticism of Indian art … was the work of the barbarous heathen’.

As an adult, however, Souza came to appreciate in Hinduism ‘the serene harmony which exists between the concepts of sexual and divine love’. And he began to question the relatively repressed treatment of the erotic in Catholic art and imagery.

Many of Souza’s paintings oscillate between an energetic expressionism, which communicates the violence of such events as the Crucifixion, and a more subdued style in which the erotic and religious co-exist harmoniously.

Almost all the pictures in this room were made while Souza was living in London between 1949 and 1967. Although his work is often seen in the context of his Indian contemporaries, the violent eroticism of much of his religious imagery has obvious parallels with work by European artists like Francis Bacon, Graham Sutherland, Pablo Picasso and Georges Rouault. Souza was familiar with the work of all these artists and his paintings were exhibited alongside those of Bacon and Sutherland as early as 1954.

This display has been devised by curator Toby Treves.

Souza at the Tate

Paperworks create flutter in Indian art scene

Uma Nair
New Delhi, May 18, 2006

"Paper has a primordial feel to it, a canvas cannot match the excitement that a sheet of paper can offer. A sheet of paper is a woman waiting to be seduced."

- Francis Newton Souza: December 25, 2000

No one could say it better than Souza and precisely 5 years after his death the world is waking up to atheist Souza's brilliance in words, wit and work.

Auction house Bonhams made history of sorts when they conducted a sale of paperworks by one Indian artist Francis Newton Souza on May 3 in London this year.

Paperworks create flutter in Indian art scene

Collectors sell as prices rise

May 4 (Bloomberg) -- Francis Newton Souza's heirs and collectors capitalized on the Indian-born artist's popularity at a Bonhams sale in London, selling drawings and watercolors that have surged in the past decade.

Souza, who died in 2002 in Mumbai after living mostly in the U.K. and the U.S., was a leader of Indian modern art, according to Artnet AG, which tracks art trends and prices. Indian buyers, enriched by growing enterprises at home or success in the West, are pushing up prices, encouraging owners to sell.

Indian Artist Souza's Heirs, Collectors Sell as Prices Rise

F.N. Souza makes history

London: Auction house Bonhams here has created history by having a sale of works of one Indian artist, Francis Newton Souza.

"The sale reflects the explosion of interest in and rising value of Indian art in general and Souza in particular," said Bonhams. The works on paper went under the hammer at New Bond Street Wednesday.

Souza auction in London makes history