Francis Newton Souza 1924-2002 Head

One of the greatest strengths of Souza's work is that he remained tirelessly experimental.  The bold complex heads of the 1950s created with thick cross hatching become further distorted in the early 1960's to result in complex mutated forms. The artist states 'I have created a new kind of face...I have drawn the physiognomy way beyond Picasso, in completely new terms.  And I am still a figurative painter...He stumped them and the whole of the western world into a shambles.  When you examine the face, the morphology, I am the only artist who has taken it a step further.'  (Dalmia, 2001, p. 94)

Edwin Mullins compared Souza to Picasso stating, 'with his finest paintings …the concentrated passion with which they were created may seem to burn over the canvas, yet the nature of the passion is less easy to place. They are full of apparent contradictions: agony wit, pathos and satire, aggression and pity. Their impact is certain but few people are able to explain what has hit them. Like Picasso, too, his interventions have tended to be thought outrageous, because the imagination that created them was discovering something about the visual world which no one as yet understood or which everyone had forgotten.’ (Edwin Mullins, 1962, p. 37).