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70
KRISHEN KHANNA
(b. 1925)
Composition
Inscribed ‘ARTIST=KRISHEN
KHANNA / TITLE=COMPOSITION
/ =1965’ (on the reverse)
1965
Oil on canvas
13.5 x 24 in (34.5 x 61 cm)
Rs 2,00,000 ‒ 3,00,000
$ 2,990 ‒ 4,480
PROVENANCE:
Kumar Gallery, New Delhi
Private Collection, London
Private Collection, USA
Private Collection, North India
“When you paint a work you don’t know where it’s going to be. At that
time all you are concerned about is how you are going to paint it.”
KRISHEN KHANNA
71
F N SOUZA
(1924 ‒ 2002)
Untitled
Signed and dated ‘Souza 75’ (upper left);
bearing Vadehra Art Gallery label on the
hardboard (on the reverse)
1975
Oil on board
23.5 x 15.75 in (60 x 39.7 cm)
Rs 20,00,000 ‒ 30,00,000
$ 29,855 ‒ 44,780
“It is in depicting heads that Souza
introduced his most inventive
features that bring to the fore his
whole painterly arsenal. His use of
colour is conventional with thick,
rigid strokes of paint squeezed
straight from the tube on to the
canvas. Their burnished quality
is reminiscent of the old masters,
its expressive content not fully
exploited and not in cohesion with
the radical quality of the subject.”
(Yashodhara Dalmia, “A Passion
for the Human Figure,”
The Making
of Modern Indian Art
,
New Delhi:
Oxford University Press, 2001, p. 93)
Souza’s heads and human forms
first appeared in the late 1940s,
undergoing gradual transformations
over time. The rigid heads became
tubular and dismembered in
appearance. In the 1970s, during
his time in New York, Souza still
showed a strong preference for
the thick black line which framed
the contours of many of his earlier
heads, but he also experimented
with heavy, colourful impasto work,
as seen in the present lot. He also
painted a series of landscapes during
this time, characterised by energetic
gestural movements, dribbling and
splotching, which critic Aziz Kurtha
likens to “action painting” in
Francis
Newton Souza: Bridging Western
and Indian Modern Art
. While this
assumed a structural appearance in
his landscapes, it produced a freer
form of expression in his figurations,
as seen in the present lot.
PUBLISHED:
Vinod Bhardwaj ed.,
Francis
Newton Souza: Dhoomimal Gallery
Collection
, New Delhi: Dhoomimal
Gallery, 2009, p. 194 (illustrated)