The Archetypal Artist, a collection of essays on the life and art of F.N. Souza, invites readers to the collective unconscious party, a high voltage zone consisting of stark art images and commentary. Be prepared to be shocked, bewildered, and amazed. Beware-since most of Souza's art images overlap with your personal unconscious, you will be triggered. Everything you have repressed and rejected will stare back at you in full glory. As the shadows and multivalent archetypes come alive and begin dancing, be strong to hold aloft the light of your own consciousness. This is what Souza did when confronted by the collective unconscious. He began mining images from it, giving them form on his canvas, culminating in a journey towards individuation and wholesomeness.
This collection of 21 essays combining research in art history, Eastern-Western philosophy, classical literature, Jungian analysis, psychology, anthropology, religion and theatre began as a personal quest by the author to seek answers to cultural constructs of life, body and sexuality. The conditioned and structured lives of men and women in society troubled her. Authoritarian narratives from religion and state thwarted attempts to attain autonomy at every step. The path to spiritual enlightenment was strewn with doubts and finding a synthesis of East and West was challenging. The tryst with Souza's art began with questions, but the very first interlude was cathartic. Embark on a subjective journey into the world of F.N. Souza.
Janeita Singh is an academician turned literary/art critic. Her writing is based on the belief of 'critic as an artist', through which she hopes to generate new perspectives of ways of seeing. With her interest in interdisciplinary research, she endeavours to morph inquiry into a webbed storytelling format to reach the general and inquisitive reader. This illustrated monograph is her debut non-fiction book based on a 12-year research project, begun in 2012.
After a preparatory phase of nationalist modernism, where the assimilation of the past and the question of identities leading to the boundaries of a national subject was the cultural problematic, the decade of the 1940s, with the imminent approach of Independence, brought to prominence a modernism in closer contact with the West. That it arose in Bombay, on the West coast, neighbouring Gujarat with its long maritime history of intimate relations with the people of West Asia, the Mediterranean and Europe, is thus no surprise. The arrival of Indian independence must be seen in the backdrop of larger world events, such as cultural modernism as a response to modernity and social dispersions as a result of World War II. Both may be seen at work in the presence of a number of European émigré Jews in Bombay at that time, particularly the trio, Walter Langhammer, Emanuel Schlesinger and Rudolf von Leyden, who seeded the artistic culture of the city with a taste for European modernism and patronized the development of an Indian modernism related to this. The Progressive Artist's Group, formed just after Independence, is a result of this new current. In keeping with its peripheral and hybrid cultural history, its founding members included the religious and ethnic minorities of India, an Indian Christian from Goa, F.N. Souza; two Muslims, S.H. Raza, M.F. Husain; and a Dalit, K.H. Ara. They represented the expansive soul of India arising in the new nation, its continuing assimilation of 'the outside in a millennia-old process of engagement between monism and pluralism. It should be noted, though, that this spirit of expansion and adventure did not last long as a local presence in cultural politics, with two of its founding members, Souza and Raza, leaving for London and Paris respectively within three years of its starting. It did not fare so well, either, in the majoritarian milieu of the rising nation, with Husain pushed to relinquish his Indian citizenship and ending his days in Doha. But whether in India or outside, the body of works produced by these artists is a testament to the psychic becoming of contemporary India.
The present book deals with one of these engagements, among the most powerful, challenging and extensive attempts to claim a national voice for a dialogue of Catholic and Hindu, Eastern and Western, ancient, modern and contemporary, mythical, ideological and natural, and celestial and phantasmagoric forces. F.N. Souza (1924-2002) was not only a founder of the group, but its leader. M.F. Husain, perhaps the best known of the group, thought of him as his teacher and mentor, who versed him in the nuances of Indian art. Of all of them, Souza's voracious visual appetite entered into close relations with the widest variety of artistic sources, from Titian and Velasquez of the European Renaissance and Baroque periods to the post-Impressionists and Fauves, the multi-perspectival Cubism of Picasso and Braque, the brutal Expressionism of Francis Bacon, the graphic eroticism of Sanchi, Khajuraho and Japanese Shunga. To those who read the book of wrestling, devouring or lovermaking in terms of success and failure, Janeita signals a clear message of success, a contrarian redemption of wholeness measured in the apotheosis of Nature. This is an ethics of inversion which may be celebrated but which, to me, is secondary to the recorded trace of the tortured process of engagement itself, its success an optical power beyond all our attempts to explain or narrativize it.
Send as free online greeting card
Email a Friend
Manage Wishlist