ARTS AND THE MAN

In his centenary year, F.N. Souza: The Archetypal Artist tries to make sense of the recurring themes in the artist’s work

- Ruchir Joshi

F.N. SOUZA
The Archetypal Artist
by Janeita Singh NIYOGI BOOKS

To give the publishers their due, the flap of the dust jacket gives you fair warning: “Be prepared to be shocked, bewildered and amazed. Beware—since most of Souza’s art images overlap with your personal unconscious, you will be triggered. Everything you have repressed and rejected will stare back at you in full glory.” In his ‘Introduction’, art historian Debashish Banerji continues the heads-up mode: “Undoubtedly, the bulk of this book is devo ted to Souza’s depictions of women and sex.”

Already slightly breathless, the reader turns to the book itself. In Section 1, ‘FN, the Feminist Artist’, there are many paintings of naked women, or perhaps the same, unchanging naked woman; over decades, uninterrupted by any other, the one kind of body type, with large breasts, narrow waist and large buttocks, that Souza feels he has to paint again and again. In case we make the mistake of interpreting these paintings as stemming from a tediously phallocra tic gawp-gaze that reduces the female body to easily recognisable sub-Picasso/ men’s magazine components, Singh brings us back to the correct path in Chapter 1.6: “F.N. Souza resurrected women from the miasma of obsessive obscene sexuality and made them sing.” In case we are still not able to hear this singing, there are more pages of Souza nudes leavened with the work of other (arguably lesser) artists like Botticelli, Goya, Indian miniature painters, Cézanne, Egon Schiele and Matisse.