Messianism, Migration, Martyrdom: Francis Newton Souza in London, 1949–1967

In 1949, the Goan Catholic artist Francis Newton Souza travelled to London from Bombay on a Portuguese passport. Over much of the following two decades, he painted themes now considered integral to his oeuvre: sexualised images of women, foreboding heads of institutions, dark religious allegories. Many critics at the time misunderstood his work and either regarded it as merely derivative of Western Expressionism (a charge he long scorned) or fetishised it as Indian painting, lumped in alongside the contributions of other non-white artists in mid-century Britain. Scholarship has since attempted to restitute Souza as a champion of global modernism. This paper, however, explores Souza's creative practice in London through several interwoven and overlooked threads: the cosmopolitanism imbued by his Goan upbringing, the visual imagination of messianic Christianity that connected Goa to the broader Lusophone world and the psychological trauma of some elements of Portuguese colonial rule that persisted in his experience of the diaspora.

Souza's interest in maternity and motherhood recurred alongside imagery of martyrdom which characterised many of his works from the 1950s and 1960s. Read in dialogue with self-portraits Souza created on the precipice of his arrival in London through to his departure to New York in 1967, this paper explores how Souza contended with a particular anticolonial, transnational political context often masked through an insistence on biography. In London, Souza grappled with the pitfalls of Portuguese colonial inheritance and the promises of self-creation, refracting his own experience through the prism of global dispossession and religious suffering.

Image credit: Francis Newton Souza, Self Portrait, oil on board, 76 x 61 cm. Image courtesy of Ruth Borchard Collection (PCF112) © Estate of F N Souza. All rights reserved, DACS 2024