Dear departed Georgina Maddox The late F N Souza is making big bucks but his museum still a dream
The late Francis Newton Souza, founder of the Bombay Progressives, is an artist who yet again affirms the cliché: A good artist is a dead one. Before one is sued for libel one must allow room clarification. Despite the surging interest in the Contemporaries, this Goan artist who spent the latter half of his life in New York, has, in the latest auctions topped the list of must-haves. A quick glance at recent auctions reveals that all the leading auctions houses have had Souza as their carrot stick: Whether it's a painting of his on the cover of the auction catalogue or the actual work up for bidding at the auction, Souza is a coveted name. The recently concluded Sotheby's auction established a new Rs 4 crore watermark for the artist while at Bonhams Dubai auction in March his canvas The Elder went for US $380,000. At Osian's Tribal Woman went for Rs 2 crore and if it's anything to go by, Saffronart have Souza on the cover of their upcoming June auction catalogue, after setting the worldwide record for the artist at Rs 6.5 crore when Lovers sold at the 2005 auction. "In between, Souza's market had leveled and that was because there were 65 of his paintings in the market at the same time," says Dinesh Vazirani, director, Saffronart. "In the Modern section of the Sotheby's sale, Souza's Red Road had seven bidders contesting for it. The canvas was a gift from Souza to his wife Maria in 1962, a period widely acknowledged as the artist's most successful," says Zara Potter Hill, head of Indian Art at Sotheby's. The work was later bequeathed by Maria to the present owner and later was exhibited at the Hayward Gallery in 1989. Technically speaking, no money exchanged hands for this work until now. Given that Souza was a rebel, expelled from the J J School of Art for being too radical, one wonders what he would make of all the zeros attached to his works of art. Clearly in his early days, he was more iconoclastic, questioning religion and society, as is the case with most of the Progressives, though he is said to have mellowed but he did not lose his lust for life, preferring the company of younger women and his New York studio to a practice in India. "Souza is one of the most bold and daring artists of his time, a breakaway person whose avant-garde style changed the face of Modern art. He also covers a wide range of subjects from nudes to landscapes-he will always be hailed as one of the best artist from India by collectors," says Vazirani. The latter half of his career was spent experimenting with different without an eye on the market. Srimati Lal, Souza's companion who was with him when he had that fatal stroke in 2002, tells us that being big at auctions was not Souza's aim. "The last wish of Francis to me was that a permanent museum of all his works be created by me in India, in his beloved motherland." http://www.expressindia.com/latest-news/Dear-departed/308293/ ~(^^)~ Avelino
