By Selma Carvalho
In the end, F. N. Souza belongs to Goans. Apart from the Tate Gallery, London, displaying one of Souza’s most emblematic works, the ‘Crucifixion,’ and Grosvenor Gallery having the occasional retrospective, F. N Souza elicits little recognition. There are no biographies paying tribute to the artist, no English heritage plaques commemorating the places he lived in, nor are there regular references made to his work in that definitive art reviewer, the TLS; he does not seep into the British consciousness the way his contemporary Francis Bacon does or even the less distinguished and one-time boarder at Souza’s house, Keith Vaughan does. This despite, Souza’s star having being ascendant during the post-war decades of British art, despite his work depicting gloomy spires and the haunting unpeopled townscapes of Hampstead Heath, despite so much of his iconography being definitively Christian, despite catapulting gallery owner Victor Musgrave into the canon of British art with sell-out exhibitions at Gallery One, and despite his painting, ‘Birth’ having sold for $4 million at Christie’s in 2015. F. N. Souza has simply attenuated from the British imagination.
So it falls to us Goans to honour Souza’s legacy and to this end, Victor Rangel-Ribeiro’s prodigious biography titled Souza: The Artist, His Loves & His Times, (Goa Publications, 2020), is the first serious effort to document the life of the artist. Ribeiro himself is an award-winning literary icon and one of the most influential writers of our times, who splits his time between the USA and Goa, and had shared a friendship with Souza. If one expects Ribeiro to deliver a hagiography, one will be quickly disappointed. Of immediate interest is the apocryphal nature of the stories Souza told about himself, inevitably creating myths which have been hard to dispel. His own origin story of how he came to be called Francis is part of this apocrypha. The lore goes that Souza’s mother Lily propitiated the venerated saint of Goa, St Francis Xavier to intercede as Souza suffered a severe bout of the pox. In return, she promised to name her son Francis if the intercession was successful. Of course, the absurdity of this assertion is laid bare by Ribeiro (as also revealed in an article by me, published in the Goan in 2014). Souza was christened Francisco Victor Newton de Souza on 8 May, 1924, a few weeks after his birth, in the traditional manner of being named after his paternal grandfather Antonio Francisco de Souza, a name he later bestowed on his second daughter by Liselotte, as Francesca. But the entirely fabricated story would endure, and follow Souza to the grave, reiterated in his obituary in the Guardian.
It is Souza’s early years which have always been sketchy and given to conjecture; Ribeiro does much to enrich our understanding of the emotionally and economically impoverished childhood endured by Souza, shunted between Goa and Bombay, often left in the custody of his grandmother, Leopoldinha, and deprived of his mother who by then had moved to Bombay. Perhaps it is this dichotomy of dispossession at one end and the stifling familiarity (perhaps even domination) of women in the Souza household, at the other end, which gives rise to much of Souza’s rancour and later misogyny towards his sexual partners. Ribeiro being a contemporary of Souza (although they never met in childhood despite at one point inhabiting households not too far apart), fills us in on what life must have been for young Souza growing up in Saligao. There is no record of Souza’s actual experiences, so Ribeiro interpolates his own into the narrative which must for now at least serve us as best they can. A small note here about Ribeiro’s glorious descriptions of pastoral early twentieth century Goa.
Souza made a career of blaming his many departures on persecution. He insisted the prudery and pearl-clutching in Bombay in response to his nudes propelled him to leave for Britain, when in fact it was Souza’s increasing awareness that India would be limiting. Ribeiro writes: ‘London had picked two of his paintings to display in a grand exhibition at a time when he was still relatively unknown in India outside of Bombay; in London, therefore, lay both his present and his future.’
That future began on 8 August, 1949, when his ship the Canton docked at Tilbury Docks. He had travelled alone, leaving behind his wife Maria, who he’d married prior to his departure. Ribeiro gives an excellent account of the London years, which were not easy for a non-white artist trying to break into the art world. Maria when she joined him, proved to be an indomitable partner. Taking up itinerant jobs as a dress maker and gradually building a clientele which included the editor-in-chief of British Vogue, she supported Souza who consistently put his art above all other responsibilities, including that of a father when their first child, Shelley, arrived in 1951. Souza would find an ally in Krishnan Menon, the Indian High Commissioner in London at the time. He would arrange for Souza a few exhibitions and commissions. During these austere years, Souza crossed the channel often and made forays into the Paris art scene, where on one occasion, Ribeiro reveals, he unexpectedly met Pablo Picasso.
Ribeiro does not make note of the crucial relationship Souza cultivated in Paris with gallerist Raymond Creuze and only fleetingly mentions art dealer Iris Clert, who was instrumental in finding Souza his most generous patron Harold Kovner. There is some speculation that it might have been Clert who introduced his work to gallerist Victor Musgrave, contrary to the commonly held view that it was poet Stephen Spender. But Ribeiro’s assertion that Musgrave had first seen Souza’s work when exhibited at a 1953 exhibition alongside Picasso and Francis Bacon, seems the more plausible explanation. The rest, of course, is history: Souza’s one-man exhibition at Musgrave’s Gallery One in 1955, would catapult him to fame.
Some exploration of Souza’s conflicted relationship with Musgrave and his wife Ida Kar, who had an open marriage and took a deep interest in prostitutes, might have been pertinent to contextualise the London art scene of the fifties. The sexual mores of Soho bohemia would have had an impact on Souza’s own shifting morality. In any case, Souza would soon abandon Maria and his daughter Shelley, for the Jewish actress Liselotte de Kristian. The passionate, turbulent years with Liselotte, were to be his most productive if also his most volatile. Sinking increasingly into the black hole of alcoholism, nonetheless during this time Liselotte and Souza had three daughters, his financial situation improved, and his shows at Gallery One were a major success. All this, could not prevent the eventual fracturing of the relationship, Souza’s wandering eye landing on the sixteen-year-old Barbara Zinkant, with whom he would emigrate to New York in 1967.
The ebbing years of Souza’s life cut a bleak figure of a man disoriented by his lack of commercial success, largely estranged from the art establishment in New York, alienated by his own caustic tongue and effrontery, spouting spurious existential theories specifically Redmondism, aimlessly traveling continents in search of commissions, exhibitions and sales, and dispensing without foresight or caution his trove of paintings which by then sold for a pittance. Quick to blame his failings on others, he often vent his ire on the queer scene, writing at one point in the Dhoomi Mal exhibition catalogue: ‘American Pop is a limp-wristed produce of vulgar camp by fruits and fag**ts, who were previously interior decorators, fashion designers and commercial artists.’ Ribeiro’s disclosure of the extent of Souza’s homophobia is shocking. Although, very few heterosexual men of the twentieth century were tolerant of homosexuality, Souza had lived in London for decades, where no doubt, many of his creative colleagues were sexually fluid, including Francis Bacon (with whom he claims to have frequented Colony Room in Soho) and Stephen Spender to whom he owed much for making him visible to the art and literary world.
Despite the robust research Ribeiro has collated which includes Souza’s diaries, letters and personal interviews, (and possibly withheld much for reasons of libel) some primary sources should have had a more impactful presence in the biography. Shelley’s writings on her father published in art catalogues are particularly perceptive and perhaps the most honest outpouring there is on Souza as husband, father and artist. Interview recordings of Liselotte Kristian as part of the Jewish oral history project deposited at the British Library are another immensely vital source of documentation, detailing their life together, his often maniacal behaviour, and the eventual breakdown of their marriage. Unfortunately, access to these recordings is now prohibited by the Souza family. (Luckily I’d heard them before access was denied.) Souza also wrote for Art News & Review in London, and there are several reviews of his early work in this publication, which expand our understanding of his creative process and struggle.
It has taken two decades after Souza’s death for the first extensive biography to emerge on the artist’s life. I am not at all hopeful of another one materialising any time soon. But should an ambitious biographer aspire to write one, they will find no better starting point than Ribeiro’s account which although not exhaustive, is for now the most definitive word on F. N. Souza, dispelling the many myths Souza created about his turbulent but prolific life. Written in Ribeiro’s exquisite prose, it is at once tremendously accessible and enjoyable.
Selma Carvalho is the founding editor at JRLJ.
Souza: The Artist, His Loves & His Times can be purchased from Sunaparanta Goa Centre for the Arts.
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