Francis Newton Souza was born in 1924 in Goa. He was a student of the JJ School of Art in Mumbai, where he was expelled for being part of the national movement. He then became a founder of the Progressive Artists? group of Mumbai in 1949. He has been called the rebel, enfant terrible and even the most pornographic of all of India?s contemporary artists. A man of humble origins, his mother was a seamstress, he espoused the cause of the left and had scant respect for the hypocrisy of the middle class world, which, in turn, hated his guts but respected his trenchant visual critique of our society.
Still, despite being the most gifted of India?s modernists, his market never came into its own as long as he lived. Uneasy with his series of wives and mistresses, they found his better-than-you attitude hard to stomach. In 1995, his works were priced as low as Rs 31.55 square cm. There was a rise in 1996 to Rs 51.46 per sq cm. But from then to 2002, his prices rose only to Rs 82.90 per sq cm in the Saffronart auction held that year. But the recent Saffronart auction has seen the price of his work soar two and a half times in the two years to Rs 289.54 per sq cm, a phenomenal rise to say the least.
What is behind this rise? A part of the story we know and understand already. Our contemporary art is part and parcel of the anti-imperialist art of the world. If the leftist Pablo Picasso sells at no less than Rs 466 crore in New York, the leftist FN Souza sold at no less than Rs 1.5 crore. Even in the recent Saffronart online auction, his Samurai sold for almost Rs 62 lakh.
Souza, however, was more than just a protagonist of anti-imperialist art, he stood by the aspirations of the working class like Picasso, as a founder of the Progressive Artists group. And even when he left the fold of the organised left, he retained a powerful, almost anarchic, radicalism in his work. His portraits of the rich and powerful show them as a blend of masks and faces, at once awe-inspiring and horrifying. His ?Death of a Pope,? painted when Pius XII, who had failed to stand up to Hitler, died, reflects his contempt for those who tread the middle path in the name of being realistic. He shows them to be rotten to the core and in an advanced stage of decay.
On the other hand, his worked-up magazine advertisements and pin-ups reflect his contempt for consumerist society. In this respect, he is much more to the point than artists like Andy Warhol who embraced consumerism while lampooning it. Souza?s art has nothing tongue-in-cheek about it. It is honest and straight-forward. And yet it is not trite. It bristles with activity. Its rendering is original. Its content is radically different and unconventional.
Moreover, for all his seeming contempt for certain sorts of human beings, he has a powerful and lyrical sense of fellow-feeling permeating his approach, which does not alienate us entirely from the subject of his painting and certainly not from the view he presents us with.
Despite the savagery of the visual critique of life around him in his canvases, a sense of being one with even the worst of human beings draws us to his works as expressions of a profound sense of humanism. This humanism is what has a future and makes his art worth investing in. However, this and his death on March 28, 2002, do not explain why his works? prices have soared as they have in 2004.
An important pointer to this development is the unprecedented prices that the works of Picasso have sold for recently. Souza, as the artist closest to Picasso in both style and living, naturally gains from these sales, but the deeper reality is the radicalisation of aesthetic tastes in the world and in India.
This radicalisation has resulted from the failure of the conservative revival of the 1990s to deliver the goods. On the contrary, the US President George Bush and UK Prime Minister Tony Blair have landed the world in a series of conflicts of which they are losing control. In India too, the fires stoked by the destruction of the Babri Mosque engulfed the BJP in the holocaust of Gujarat and could not be put out by its damage-control exercises. They led to defeat. In the US too, the same thing is likely to happen. If it does not, we will see more destruction and, of course, more radicalism.
The investor, therefore, must learn to shed conventional prejudices, look at art from an original angle and learn to look at life around as differently from the way we used to in the past, when the world is changing and art too with it. Investors also must change if they wish to benefit from the developments taking place around them.