Bid & Hammer > Souza: Property from the K.B. Goel collection

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F N SOUZA (1924 - 2002)

ASN0027 Auction Type: Silent Bids

Landscape in Green
Acrylic on Canvas
Signed & dated 85 top centre right
Dimension: 28 x 58 in

$65,450 - $89,250

Provenance Provenance

Property from the family collection of eminent art critic K.B. Goel (1930 - 2018), who was a great friend of the artist

Literature Literature

Reality with him is personal; it is so private that its public face is an enactment of theatrical situations. But the recent signature on displayed landscapes does not come in the way of our old habits of seeing; the traditional attributes in his landscapes are still there, but, step by slow step, these have been pushed in the direction of abstraction – away from the pictorial subject, away from the references to topography and architectural forms. These landscapes do not carry an indexical relation to the symbolic land of a homeless disinherited mind – as his earlier landscapes did. We rather confront them as we confront an artist painting in public where the act of painting is completed by a spectator. To view these landscapes is to see Souza giving a demonstration of painting, such as he gave at the last Triennale. Here, as there, the maker and the spectator meet – K.B. Goel

Notes Notes

K.B GOEL (1930 - 2018)

Kanha Babu Goel was born in 1930 to a family of grain merchants from Deeg, Rajasthan. After studying Philosophy at University Maharaja's College, Jaipur, he rose to become a distinguished journalist and art critic from the 1950s, when the Modern Indian Art movement was taking off. He worked for a number of prominent publications until the late 1990s, during which he also wrote for select exhibition catalogues. In this period he was on the juries of the Madhya Pradesh government’s Kalidas Samman 1985 and was also the commissioner of the Indian art pavilion at the 1991 Havanna Biennial. He wrote extensively on J. Swaminathan (Group 1890) and also on the Progressive Artist Group members, the founder patron of which - Francis Newton Souza – the ‘enfant terrible of Indian art’ - became his great friend and gifted him several works on his visits to Delhi, some of which the artist stated were the finest he had executed. The friendship, respect and admiration extended between the respective families as well. After battling flailing health in his later years, he died in January 2018. A book on his critical writings was posthumously published in 2020.