1924–2002 · Saligão, Goa
F. N. Souza
Goan painter who co-founded the Progressive Artists' Group in Bombay and spent most of his working life in London and New York. His heads, nudes and religious subjects are drawn with a rough, deliberate violence.
F. N. Souza was born Francisco Victor Newton de Souza in 1924 in Saligão, in Portuguese Goa, to Goan Catholic parents. His father died when he was three months old, and in 1929 his mother took him to Bombay. He was expelled from St Xavier’s College for obscene graffiti, and in 1945 from the Sir J. J. School of Art for taking part in the Quit India movement.
In 1947 he co-founded the Progressive Artists’ Group in Bombay with S. H. Raza, M. F. Husain and others. His work drew complaints of obscenity, and in 1949 he left for London. The first years there were hard; his wife Maria took several jobs to keep the family. Then in 1955 Stephen Spender printed his autobiographical essay Nirvana of a Maggot in Encounter, the dealer Victor Musgrave gave him a show at Gallery One, and it sold out.
John Berger, who wrote about him with admiration, called the style deliberately eclectic: expressionist at heart, with borrowings from Art Brut and British Neo-Romanticism. Birth (1955), a nude of his partner Liselotte while pregnant with their first daughter, was shortlisted for the Guggenheim International Award in 1958. He also wrote, publishing Words and Lines in 1959.
He moved to New York in 1967 and later divided his time between India and the United States. Husain called him his mentor. He died in Bombay in 2002 and is buried in the Sewri Christian Cemetery. His work is in Tate, the British Museum, the V&A and the National Gallery of Modern Art in New Delhi.
Notable works
- Birth1955
- The Last Supper1990