F.N. Souza was born in the village of Saligão, Goa, India, in 1924 and moved to Bombay (now Mumbai) in 1929. He immigrated to London, England, in 1949, where he became an acclaimed painter, living and working there until 1967.
Painter and writer F.N. Souza was born Victor Newton de Souza into a Roman Catholic family in the village of Saligão, Goa (under Portuguese rule until 1961) on 12 April 1924. His mother gave him the additional name Francis in thanks to St Francis Xavier, patron saint of Goa, after Souza recovered from smallpox which almost killed him as a young child and left him physically scarred. Following the deaths of his father, a schoolteacher, and his sister, Souza moved with his mother to Bombay (now Mumbai) in 1925. His mother, a dressmaker, remarried and Souza’s half-brother was the artist Lancelot Ribeiro. Souza attended St Xavier's College in Bombay, and later the Sir J.J. School of Art, but was expelled from the former in 1939, accused of drawing obscene graffiti, and from the latter in 1945, likely for taking part in the Quit India Movement. In 1947, he was a founding member of the Bombay Progressive Artists' Group, formed soon after India's Independence to express and define modern art in India. In 1947-48 his work was shown for the first time in Britain at the Exhibition of Indian Art at Burlington House, London. Souza soon became frustrated by a lack of professional recognition in India, noticed by the authorities for his political beliefs, and accused of creating ‘obscene’ paintings.
On 22 July 1949, Souza left for London to pursue his artistic career. ‘[A]stonished by the grimness of Britain’ on his arrival (Salter, ‘Francis Newton Souza’, p. 110), his first few years there were marked by poverty and misery as he struggled to establish himself within artistic and literary circles. Nevertheless, he found opportunities to write and occasional commissions and exhibitions, including a show at India House organised by the India High Commissioner, Krishna Menon, in 1951. He also attended classes at the Central School of Art from 1949 and spent time studying and painting in Paris. By the mid-1950s, Souza’s career had taken off and he was considered one of the most exciting painters in London, exhibiting and selling his work regularly. In 1954, he exhibited three paintings at the recently opened Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA). This was followed by a solo show at Gallery One in February 1955, which coincided with the publication of his autobiographical essay 'Nirvana of a Maggot' in Encounter magazine, bringing further recognition. In 1957, his Portrait of an Indian Philosopher won a prize at the John Moores painting competition in Liverpool, and he was invited to represent Great Britain in the Guggenheim International Award in 1958. A collection of autobiographical essays and line drawings, Words and Lines, was published in 1959 and his work received attention from critics including David Sylvester and Edwin Mullins, whose monograph on the artist was published in 1962.
Souza exhibited regularly at Gallery One between 1955-62 and at the Grosvenor Gallery between 1964-66. Although he experimented with different genres and styles, he became best known for his expressive figuration, line drawings using cross-hatching techniques, and series of 'black paintings' produced in London during the 1950s and 1960s. Souza’s upbringing continued to have a profound effect on his work and he was influenced by the grand structures, ceremony, and imagery of suffering associated with Catholicism. His experience of India was marked by British rule and the violence and chaos of Partition, followed by discrimination and personal anguish as he negotiated his identity in postwar Britain. The human figure predominates in his work, often with distorted facial characteristics, and beneath the surface a seething violence can frequently be detected. Themes of religion and sex, suffering and pleasure, are explored through a synthesis of eastern and western techniques and motifs. In 1957, a review in The Times declared him 'an aggressive artist who uses the frontal attack', whose 'violent and impressive' heads achieve 'a sort of grandeur through ugliness' ('Portraits by Sculptors and Painters', 22 November 1957). His ‘black paintings’ were shown at the Grosvenor Gallery in 1966 but did not receive the critical acclaim or commercial success of previous displays of his work. In 1967, Souza migrated to New York. He continued to exhibit internationally, and later divided his time between New York and Mumbai. His significant role within British modernism was recognised with his inclusion in the survey show, The Other Story: Afro-Asian Artists in Post-War Britain , Hayward Gallery, London (1989).
F.N. Souza died in Mumbai, India on 28 March 2002 following a heart attack. In 2005, Tate Britain held a major retrospective, Religion and Erotica. He was featured in Ben Uri's online exhibition Midnight's Family: 70 Years of Indian Artists in Britain in 2020 and in Postwar Modern: New Art in Britain, 1945–1965 at the Barbican Art Gallery in 2022. His work is held in UK public collections including Tate Modern, Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, British Museum, Victoria and Albert Museum, and Hepworth Wakefield.