Saturday, May 6, 2006

THIS ABOVE ALL
Souza’s lust for life
Khushwant Singh

I was born in Goa in 1924. My grandmother and grandfather were both chronic drunkards." So begins a short auto-biographic note appended at end of Francis Newton Souza: Bridging Western and Indian Modern Art (Mapin) by Aziz Kurtha. He does not tell the reader more about himself. His father was a teetotaller who died early leaving behind a young widow, a daughter who died soon after himself and Souza. The mother moved to Bombay to earn a living as a typist and stitching clothes. Souza learnt how to stitch his trousers buttons. He had no training as an artist but he drew obscene pictures of nude women in school lavatories. His teachers spotted him because no other boy had the same gift of drawing as he.

While still at school, Souza decided to become an artist: that despite his aversion to the smell and looks of paint coming of a tube; it reminded him of slimy serpents. In 1949, he migrated to London. He had very little money. He was able to survive because of the bounty of people like the poet Stephen Spender and Harold Kovnen (Paris) who bought everything he painted and lent him money when he ran out of it.

He does not tell us anything about the women in his life. Apparently, there were quite a few. There was his Goan wife who ran a small art shop where she continued to sell her husband’s pictures even after he divorced her. There was his mistress Liselotte Kristian who bore him three daughters without marrying him. From the many paintings he made of her, it appears she must have been the one real love of his life. In the book, there is one of Lila, as he called her, in the nude when she was pregnant. It is in water colour and gouche. It is one of the most beautiful nudes that I have ever seen. He apparently refused to sell it. It is a masterpiece but its whereabouts are not divulged.

Souza’s paintings went through three different phases. To start with, his themes were Biblical: Madonna and Child, the Last Supper, Crucifixion, Resurrection etc. Then he turned to Hindu iconography of South Indian bronzes and erotic sculptures of Khajuraho, Konark and other temples. Women in these paintings become full bosomed, broad hipped and with large buttocks. He developed what can be best described as ‘vulva-fixation,’explicitly depicting women’s private parts.

An element of lust becomes manifest. During the period he became a leader of Progressive Artists and a communist. And finally in Europe, he was exposed to works of European as well as avantegrade painters: Cezanne, Titian, Courbet, Pircasso, Cubists, and Dadaists, Souza combined all three in his most productive phase to become the pioneer of modern Indian art, M.F. Husain recognised him as his mentor. His paintings were bought by the Tata Gallery and Albert and Victoria museums. He had one-man exhibitions in London, Paris and New York. On one of his home visits, he was taken ill in Bombay and died on March 28, 2002. He was 78.

Aziz Kurtha is a solicitor practising in Abu Dhabi and London. He is as involved in fine arts as in the Law. Earlier, he published a collection of erotic drawings left by calligrapher Saadquain who made his living making artistic versions of the ayats of the holy Koran. He was at the same time a hard drinker and shared Souza’s vulva obsession.

With every two drawings, he appended a verse of Urdu poetry composed by himself in praise of women’s pubic hair like an oasis amid sand dunes of flesh. Kurtha asked me to translate them in English — which I did. He invited Souza to Abu Dhabi, kept him as a house guest and arranged an exhibition for him. Souza did not find many buyers for his art. His paintings of village women is as, if not more powerful, than Amrita Sher-Gil’s which fetched almost Rs 7 crore in an auction. Kurtha has made amends by producing a lavishly illustrated coffee-tabler of the best of Souza’s paintings. It is a veritable feast for the eyes.

Three men go into a motel. The man behind the desk said the room is $ 30, so each man paid $ 10 and went to the room.

A while later the man behind the desk realised the room was only $ 25, so he sent the bell boy to the 3 guy’s room with $5.

On the way the bell boy could not figure out how to split $5 evenly between 3 men, so he gave each man a $ 1 and kept the other $2 for himself. This meant that the 3 men each paid $ 9 for the room which is a total of $27, add the $2 that the bell boy kept $29.

Where is the other dollar?

(Contributed by Vipin Buckshey, New Delhi)