About Francis Newton Souza

Born in 1924 in Goa, Souza studied painting at the Sir J.J. School of Art, but was suspended in 1945 because of his support for the Quit India Movement. He was a founding member of the Progressive Artists’ Group, and was the first post-independence Indian artist to achieve high recognition in the West. Souza's unrestrained and graphic style creates thought provoking and powerful images.

Souza's paintings express defiance and impatience with convention and with the banality of everyday life. An iconoclast known for his powerful imagery, Souza's unrestrained and graphic style created much controversy in his life and work. His repertoire of subjects covers still life, landscape, nudes and icons of Christianity, rendered boldly in a frenzied distortion of form. Souza's paintings express defiance and impatience with convention and the banality of everyday life. His own words describe his works more explicitly than anything else. “I express myself freely in paint, in order to exist.” His work is in major museum collections around the world including the Tate Gallery, London and the National Gallery of Modern Art, New Delhi. He left India in 1949 to live in London, moving to New York in 1967. New York remained his domicile until his death in 2002.