Painting by Francis Newton Souza
| Photo Credit: Special Arrangement

As Passion Week looms near beginning April 12, one recalls India’s enfant terrible Francis Newton Souza, one of artist Krishen Khanna’s greatest friends and founder of the Progressive Arts Group now known as India Moderns.

Why does one remember Souza, and how does he connect to Holy Week? While he was critical of the Church, he was a lover of church music and hymns. When in the city of Delhi during the 1990s he would come to the Church of the Redemption at President’s Estate to listen to the Christmas concert of the Delhi Christian Chorus with his best friend Virendra Kumar.

Last year at the home of a friend, 99-year-oldKrishen recalledhis archives of letters and remembered how they would visit concerts together in London.

In one of his exhibitions in 1948 at the Bombay Art Salon,Souza had written: “I was born in Goa in April 1924, my parents are Roman Catholics. I am an atheist, but I developed a love for stained-glass windows and church music. First the Gregorian chant and Mozart’s ‘Requiem’ and Beethoven’s ‘Mass in D’, made lasting impressions on my mind. It is Bach however who made my musical appreciation. He is rarely played in Catholic churches because he was a Protestant.”

Francis Newton Souza
| Photo Credit:
Special Arrangement

On April 12, 2025 Francis Newton Souza would have turned 101, and this is a good time to think back on the life and times of this genius andmaverick who believed Nature was the true God.

The first time I met him in the early 1990s he spoke of his memories of Konkani hymns sung at mass in Bombay. His love for those memories brought about his many paintings on the Eucharist with the still life of the chalice. These paintings at the 100-year celebration by Grosvenor Gallery, London, exhibited in Delhi this January, brought back fresh vignettes of Souza.

Materials and compositional clarity were Souza’s best allies. He could with pastel and paint create a series of Eucharist studies in the cadences of cubist idioms and fascinating facets. His choice of colour and the cross-hatched textures created their own synergy. Amongst all these were his still life studies of vases with flowers created as a recall of church masses in childhood. The churches then and its many multi-farious architectural nuances too became a part of the landscape of his evolution.

Painting by Francis Newton Souza
| Photo Credit:
Special Arrangement

While one looked at his priest heads and found them robust as well as resilient, one recalls his contempt for the priests who he felt had fallen to corrupt ways in the service of the Church.

This April as Holy Week dawns we must with love and appreciation, remember this great Indian artist who etched the lines of contemporary art history with his innate love for sacred music as well as humble rituals born of his Catholic upbringing. Christ’s Crucifixion was a subject he created with verve and vivacity.Golgotha in Goa,was one such classic work offered at an auction years ago.

The writer is an art curator and critic.