Time: 29 August – 18 October 2025
Place: Emami Art, Gallery 3, Kolkata
Overview
Emami Art is pleased to announce FN Souza: Drawings and Chemical Alterations, an exhibition of drawings and chemical alterations by Francis Newton Souza, opening at our gallery on August 29, 2025. The works on view, created in the final decades of his life, since 1984, were marked by the master’s powerful imagination and trademark style of linear figuration.
The founder and guiding spirit of the Progressive Artists’ Group (PAG), which revolutionised modern art in India, FN Souza (1924-2002), left the country for England in the late 1940s for better exposure and fortune. Even though he lived the rest of his life in the West, first in England and then in New York, and his work also bears a prominent mark of Western influences, he always recognised himself as an Indian artist with a mixed heritage of Portuguese-Goan descent and sensibilities deeply rooted in the openness and plurality of Indian culture.
However, while drawing on diverse elements from heterogeneous sources, he, unlike many of his contemporaries, did not seek to form an eclectic style integrating national cultural identity into his modernist art. Looking at his restlessness and sheer individuality, the renowned writer, John Berger, once famously commented that he had ‘straddled many traditions but served none’. This powerful individuality also resonates with the works on paper in the exhibition.
It appears that Souza had always been freer, more diverse, energetic and inventive while working on paper than on his major canvases. Around the late 1960s in New York, Souza invented the new techniques of chemical alteration on magazine paper, which made up a significant part of his oeuvre. Manipulating the print of magazine paper with a chemical solution, he altered its colours and images, engaging his drawing and writing in a dialogue with the published ones that remained visible below the chemically changed surface. The earlier experiments were simple, but gradually the work became more complex and layered. The exhibition includes some of the finest works of chemical alteration.
The exhibition, significantly, includes two fine portraits: Souza’s portrait of Srimati Lal and Srimati Lal’s portrait of Souza. The works of Souza’s final decades in the show – most of them seem to have not widely been shown before – have a special connection to Srimati Lal (1959-2019), the journalist, curator, and painter, widely known as Souza’s close friend and muse since the early 1990s. Souza drew many portraits of Srimati Lal and some of them are well-known. The archival documents – some of them are on display – that we received from Lal’s family reveal the close relationship between Souza and Srimati Lal and her family. Besides being a painter, Souza was a fine poet and writer; the documents provide a glimpse of his literary genius.
The works shown here, therefore, have a specific historical context. They were created during the period when Souza’s bond with his country had increasingly deepened, and his visits to India every winter were not just to avoid the cold of New York’s weather.
Biography of the Artist
Francis Newton Souza was born in April 1924 in Portuguese Goa to Joseph Newton, an English teacher, and Lily Mary Antunes in a Catholic family of Konkani origin. He grew up in Bombay and studied art at Sir J J School of Art. The Roman Catholic Church, with its architectural elegance and services, had a decisive impact on him, and for a short while, he was associated with the Communist Party of India.
In 1949, soon after he had founded the historic Progressive Artists' Group (PAG) with SH Raza, MF Hussain, Ara, Gade, and Bakre in 1947, Souza left India, and his career flourished in Europe and America, shaping India's artistic modernism in the post-Independence era. As early as 1955, Souza published his famous autobiography, The Nirvana of Maggot, coinciding with his Gallery One exhibition (1955). Widely exhibited in India and abroad, he is known for his powerful figurative images and erotic imagination, which show his complex views on religion, life, and artistic traditions. He had numerous solo and retrospective exhibitions, including the six solo shows at Gallery One, London, 1955-61; exhibition at Kumar Art Gallery, New Delhi, 1962; at London Arts Gallery, Detroit, 1968; at Julian Hartnoll Gallery, London, 1997; at Bose Pacia Modern Gallery, New York, 1998; Souza in the Forties, at Dhoomimal Gallery, New Delhi, 1983; The Human and the Divine Predicament, at Grosvenor Gallery, London, 1964; The Chemicals of Souza and The Acrylics of Souza, LTG Gallery, New Delhi, 1995 and 1996 respectively; Retrospectives I, II, and III, at Kumar Gallery, New Delhi, 1999 – 2001; and Souza in Bombay and Goa, at Art Musings Gallery, Bombay, 2001; among several others.
Souza received many awards including the Guggenheim International Award, the highest monetary award in the arts, in 1967. Prestigious institutions worldwide have his works in their collections, including Tate Britain, which hosted his solo show, Religion and Erotica, in 2005.
Besides being a painter, Souza was a poet and prolific writer. His Words and Lines published in London in 1959 is widely read and appreciated.
FN Souza died in Mumbai in 2002.
