Francis Newton Souza was born in the year 1924 in Saligao, a small town in the state of Goa. Tragedy struck him at a very young age, when he lost his father. He was also bogged down by a serious attack of small pox. Such incidents provoked him to create his own niche in this world. Francis Newton Souza took admission into the Sir J.J. School of Art of Mumbai. But, was expelled for participating in the Quit India Movement. Thereafter, he founded Progressive Artist’s Movement in 1947, along with S.H. Raza, M.F, Hussain, K.H. Ara, etc. F.N. Souza’s biography and life history tells us that he left the country in 1949 and went to London to pursue his interest in painting. After struggling for a few years, he finally received recognition in the 1950′s with his solo exhibition at the ‘Gallery One’ in London. Around the same time, his autobiographical essay ‘Nirvana of a Maggot’ was published. In 1959, another one of his books ‘Words and Lines’ was published and it received literary recognition. In the year 1967, F.N. Souza migrated to the New York City in America. He participated in the ‘Commonwealth Artists of Fame’ exhibition in London in 1977. Souza participated in an exhibition in Detroit in 1968. His retrospectives were held in New Delhi and Mumbai in 1987. Francis Newton Souza also had shows at the ‘Indus Gallery’ of Karachi in 1988 and the ‘Bose Pacia Modern’ of New York in 1998. He breathed his last in the year 2002. Presently, the paintings of F.N. Souza adorn the Tate Gallery of London and the National Gallery of Modern Art in New Delhi. His Style The subjects covered in the paintings of Francis Newton Souza comprise of still life, landscape, nudes, icons of Christianity, etc. One of the most recurring themes is that of the conflicts in a man-woman relationship. However, the figures have been deliberately distorted and reveal an uninhibited and realistic style. Souza was a rebel and non-conformist and these views reflect in his painting style also. At the same time, there is a visible influence of the folk art of Goa, the Renaissance paintings, landscapes of the 18th and 19th century Europe, etc.

His early work appears to be influenced by Western Art as well as Indian modernist traditions. Souza paintings are peopled with erotic female nudes, landscapes and Christian themes. Souza’s creative work revolves largely around his Roman Catholic background as well as his hostility towards it. Souza seems to have been forever searching for novelty.Souza abhorred convention and this element figured prominently in his unrestrained and defiant brush as it recreating his own commandments for a perfect civilization and enlightened art. 

His pen was equally potent. He penned several articles and publications which dealt with diverse subjects and included political issues and scientific inquests. He won the Guggenheim International Award in 1958. Writing about himself, he goes into the sequence of death, creation, endeavor, failure, alcoholism and sobriety.His thinking was a medley of diverse influences: the folk art of native Goa, the upbeat stance of the Catholic church, the grandiose portraiture of Renaissance Europe and the landscape art of the 18th and 19th century. He kept track of the writings of Einstein, Darwin and Hawking, and mixed science and art to create canvases peopled with largely disturbing, powerful images. 

Souza was an international figure where art was concerned and displayed his work at exhibitions in France, Japan, Germany, Sweden, Italy, Brazil, Argentina, USA, Canada and India. He had been represented in important group shows featuring themes from religion to erotic art and his collection are found in famed museums, to mention a few Israel to Australia to the Tate Gallery in London.

New York remained his domicile until his death in march 28, 2002.

 For more paintings on Old  masters please visit www.indianartideas.com

Andrew Lloyd Webber’s art charity was rapped by the Charity Commission yesterday for allowing the theatre impresario to recall its pictures to hang them privately at his homes or offices.

The commission said that it was satisfied that Lord Lloyd-Webber had paid a licence fee, or rent, for the paintings which was set by an independent valuer. But it criticised the charity for creating the impression that its multi-millionaire founder was personally benefiting from the charity.

The commission criticised the trustees’ decision to display painting of St Cecilia by John William Waterhouse at London’s Palace Theatre during the run of the Andrew Lloyd Webber musical Woman in White which it argued “enhanced this perception of private benefit to the founder”.

Its report said: “Such perceptions need to be appropriately managed by the trustees so as not to erode public trust and confidence in this charity and charities more generally.”

The investigation was also told that there had been occasions when paintings had been recalled while on public display, coinciding with dignitaries viewing Lord Lloyd-Webber’s private collection. The commission advised the trustees that paintings should not be recalled in this way as this was a private benefit.

However, the Commission found that there were clear benefits to the public from the charity both through the public display of the paintings at galleries and exhibitions and through the foundation’s website.

A spokeswoman for the Andrew Lloyd Webber Art Foundation said the charity had accepted and implemented all the recommendations put forward by the commission.

Born: 1887
Died: 1972
Achievements: Developed a personal painting style inspired largely by traditional Indian folk and village arts, particularly those of Bengal. Through his paintings he gave expression to the scenes of everyday life of the people of rural Bengal

Jamini Roy was one of the most significant and influential painters of the 20th century. He was born in a middle-class family in 1887 at Beliator village in Bankura district of Bengal. His father Ramataran Roy was an amateur artist who, after resignation from government service, spent the rest of his life in his village amidst the potters.

In 1903, at the age of sixteen, Jamini Roy came to Calcutta and studied at the Government School of Art. He learnt academic methods then in vogue in the West, and achieved his early fame as a portrait painter in the European tradition. However, soon Jamini Roy cultivated a personal painting style inspired largely by traditional Indian folk and village arts, particularly those of Bengal. Jamini Roy, through his oil paintings, gave expression to the scenes of every-day life of the people of rural Bengal.

For his paintings, Jamini Roy selected themes from joys and sorrows of everyday life of rural Bengal, religious theme like-Ramayana, Sri Chaitanya, Radha-Krishna and Jesus Christ, but he depicted them without narratives. Apart from this he painted scenes form the lives of the aboriginal Santhals, such as ‘Santhals engaged in drum-beating’ ‘Santhal Mother and Child’ ‘Dancing Santhals’ etc.

In his career as an artist Jamini Roy earned fame by evolving his own language of painting which he termed as ‘Flat Technique’. Jamini Roy used cheap indigenous pigments for his art to make them within the reach of the affluent as well as the poor. Like the pata-painters of Bengal he proposed his own paintings from indigenous materials like lampblack, chalk-powder, leaves and creepers.

The exposition of Jamini Roy’s works were first held in British India Street (Calcutta) in 1938. Jamini Roy’s pictures become very popular during the 1940s and clientele included both the Bengali middle class and European community. In 1946, his work was exhibited in London and in 1953 in New York.

Jamini Roy was honored with the Padma Bhushan in 1955. He died in 1972 in Calcutta.

Some of his famous paintings are:

• Santhal Boy with Drum
• Cats Sharing a Prawn
• St. Ann and the Blessed Virgin
• Makara
• Cats Plus
• Seated Woman in Sari
• Krishna And Radha Dancing
• Kitten
• Virgin And Child
• Crucifixion with Attendant Angels
• Ravana, Sita And Jatayu
• Warrior King
• Krishna with Gopis in Boat
• Krishna and Balarama

for more paintings on Jamini roy  vist www.indianartideas.com  or mail us at info@indianartideas.com

Maqbool Fida Husain, (born September 17, 1915, Pandharpur, Maharashtra) popularly known as M F Husain, is one of India‘s best known artists and his work over a career of over seven decades has been prolific.According to Forbes magazine, he has been called the “Picasso of India”.

At an early age he learnt the art of calligraphy and practiced the Kulfic khat with its geometric forms. He also learnt to write poetry while staying with an uncle in a madrasa in Baroda, an art that has stayed with him through his life. His early education was perfunctory but Husain’s love of drawing was evident even at this stage. Whenever he got a chance he would strap his painting gear to his bicycle and drive out to the surrounding countryside of Indore to paint the landscape. In 1937 he reached Mumbai determined to become an artist, with hardly any money and lived m a cheap room in a by lane inhabited by pimps and prostitutes. Initially Husain apprenticed himself to a painter of cinema hoardings which he would paint with great dexterity perched on scaffolding sometimes in the middle of traffic.

Husain was noticed for the first time in 1947 when he won an award at the annual exhibition of the Bombay Art Society. Subsequently he was invited by Souza to join the Progressive Artist’s Group. A great deal of experimentation in the early years led to some remarkable works Re Between The Spider And The Lamp, Zameen and Man. By 1955 he was one of the leading artists in India and had been awarded the Padma Shri. He was a special invitee along with Pablo Picasso at the Sao Paulo Biennial in 1971. Along with several solo exhibitions he had major retrospectives in Mumbai in 1969, in Calcutta in 1973 and in Delhi in 1978. He has participated in many international shows which include Contemporary Indian Art, Royal Academy of Arts, London 1982; Six Indian Painters, Tate Gallery, London 1985; Modem Indian Painting, Hirschhom Museum, Washington 1986 and Contemporary Indian Art, Grey Art Gallery, New York 1986.

In 1967 he won the Golden Bear at the International Film Festival at Berlin for his documentary Through the Eyes of a Painter and has made several short films since then. Husain was awarded the Padma Bhushan in 1973, the Padma Vibhushan in 1989 and was nominated to the Rajya Sabha in 1986. One of the most charismatic artists in India today, he is known for his emphatic understanding of the human situation and his speedy evocation of it in paint. The early evolution of his painterly language was overtaken by adventurous forays into installations and performance art. His experimentations with new forms of art are both unexpected and pioneering. Husain went on to become the highest paid painter in India. His single canvases have fetched up to $2 million at a recent Christie’s auction. At the age of 92 Husain was to be given the prestigious Raja Ravi Varma award by the government of Kerala.

The artist now lives in mumbai.

For more paintings of M. F. Husain Visit www.indianartideas.com or contact us at info@indianartideas.com.

Through an odd fortuity, the Brooklyn Museum has mounted “James Tissot: ‘The Life of Christ’” at the same time as Robert Crumb’s illustrations to the Book of Genesis have arrived in bookshops across the nation. Nearly one and a quarter centuries separate the two artists, yet both undertook the extraordinary labor of illustrating their chosen biblical texts with several hundred painstakingly rendered images.There, however, the comparison ends. Mr. Crumb, best known for inventing such countercultural icons as Mr. Natural, has translated the first book of the Bible into the thickly inked language of his underground comics. He manages to rise to irreligion only in his depictions of Lot and his daughters—or, rather, they would be irreligious were it not for the fact that Mr. Crumb has accurately rendered the text. A few fundamentalists, it is true, have taken the bait, but the great majority of Americans have greeted his illustrations with that tepid respect they reserve for cultural artifacts that don’t really concern them directly.

Nothing reveals the drastic shift in societal consensus more than our collective indifference to Mr. Crumb or an earlier generation’s excitement and disquiet before the biblical watercolors of James Tissot, all 350 of which were purchased en masse by the Brooklyn Museum in 1900 and are now on view in their galleries. To see his largely sober, realist works today, one would be hard put to imagine why anyone was ever offended. And it is true that many of Tissot’s contemporaries, among them Zola, the Brothers Goncourt and Manet, viewed them as worthy examples of religious art. But many contemporaries professed to be scandalized by them, especially by their recounting the life of Christ in the language of realism.

Until he completed this project, Tissot (1836-1902), a native of Nantes in Brittany, was known primarily for his candy-box depictions of contemporary high society on the Continent and in England. But then, to the surprise of all his friends, he suddenly found religion in his late 40s and decided to tell the story of Christ’s passion in 350 illustrations. He conceived them not only in the realist style, but in the Orientalist idiom of Gérôme and Fromentin. The art of all three men is characterized by a militant positivism, a determination to describe the exotic East, and everything else, “as it really was.” But although many of Tissot’s contemporaries were realists and many more treated biblical subjects, none of them had merged the two strains of contemporary culture as aggressively as Tissot did in these watercolors.The guiding intellectual force behind the images was Ernest Renan, whose “Vie de Jésus” (1863), one of the most influential books of the 19th century, undertook to track down “the historical Jesus.” Renan wrote of him as though he were a historical figure no different from Isaac Newton or Louis XIV. The point of the book, and of Tissot’s watercolors, was not to diminish Christ, as critics of both men alleged, but rather to make him acceptable to that part of contemporary culture that could no longer accept Christ through the gauze of scriptural authority, that had to see him face to face.

In preparing for this great task, Tissot seemed like an athlete training for a marathon. He studied Scripture and read all the most recent historians on the subject. He even traveled extensively in the Holy Land (dressed at times like a native) and interviewed rabbis and Bedouins in order to understand Christ in the plentitude of his reality. We see, in the 350 paintings, all the favorite subjects of Western art over the previous 15 centuries: the Annunciation, Christ in the Garden, the Crucifixion and the Resurrection, largely depicted in the visual language of downtown Jerusalem in the late 19th century.

Given all the effort, one would like to respond more positively to the results. But it is difficult to dispel the feeling that something about Tissot’s “Life of Christ” was very wrong from the start. You could begin with the medium itself: Whereas oil-painting is the medium of minute detail, watercolors lend themselves to a charming allusiveness and indeterminacy. Tissot seems hell-bent on extorting from this fragile medium a precision of detail it cannot render, or render well.The result, all too often, is a brittle and unlovely pedantry that is especially disappointing when we see in the flesh, at the Brooklyn Museum, what were originally intended as mass-produced illustrations. And precisely because these generally diminutive works are illustrations aspiring to the status of autonomous paintings, there is something disappointing in their often inattentive and unimaginative compositions—very different from the lilting, waltzing swerves of Tissot’s earlier and far more worldly depictions of the Parisian beau monde. All the magic and mysticism have been chased away, and in their place is a sunlit Jerusalem as prosaic as midtown Manhattan at rush hour.

Finally, an ineffaceable and unappealing odor of marketing hovers over these 350 watercolors. Starting in the 1890s, Tissot took them on tour around the continent and even in North America, where the locals each paid 25 cents for a peek at them. A costly book, reproducing all of the images together with the relevant text and learned commentary, promptly appeared in French and in English.

But the greatest coup of all was the sale of the entire series to the then-nascent Brooklyn Museum for the princely sum of $60,000, at the energetic instigation of John Singer Sargent. When the works went on view, they put the institution squarely on the cultural map. Hundreds of people attended each day, and one clergyman, the Rev. Lyman Abbott, said that “to look upon these pictures . . . is to come as near to living the Christ’s life as is permitted to any one living in this modern world.”

But the delight in these works proved to very short-lived. Soon after their purchase, they were dispatched to the vaults of the museum, where they were to remain, largely unseen, for most of the next century. And now they emerge into a vastly different world from the one they last inhabited. Some dazzle of virtuosity remains, but their principal charm consists in embodying a period style that vanished long ago.

Young Indian artist Raghava KK, (currently based in New York) has been invited to speak at the TED (technology, entertainment and design) conference that will be held in Long Beach, California, along with Bill Gates and Eve Ensler to address audiences from around the world. TED is a nonprofit organisation devoted to ‘ideas worth spreading’and since 1990 people from around the world share their unique and path-breaking ideas at this annual conference.At the conference which is scheduled for February 2010,Raghava will be talking about art and how it has given him the education and opportunity to learn about the world. He says, “Their selection process is undisclosed, but I am very glad that they chose me. I have not gone to any art school or college and have learnt my art by travelling around the world and seeing art all over.”

Raghava is specially known for incorporating cartoons into his works — the main feature of his quirky art works. A few months ago, Raghava, his wife, theirinfant son and dog decided to start a new chapter and moved to New York. Raghava says, “Nothing was planned, we had no house and I only vaguely knew that I would practice art, but that’s about it.” He adds, “Earlier I had taken off to visit Europe without any money or food. During my journey, I met lots of people, interacted with them, share my art with them and had a good experience. These experiences taught me a lot and this is exactly what I am going to talk about at TED.”

Raghava’s experiences of moving to America are translated in his art works that can be viewed at Gallery Musings in the exhibition titled Brooklyn Bound R Train till January 20.

Wealth advisers renowned for sponsoring art shows to attract clients are starting to use them to attract the attention of individuals from booming emerging markets.

UK wealth manager Barclays Wealth has boosted this initiative by announcing a sponsorship deal with two contemporary Indian art exhibitions.

Fresh from its sponsorship of tennis tournament the ATP World Tour Finals, it will sponsor two Indian exhibitions in London, ‘The Mother Teresa Series’ by M.F.Husain and ‘The Five Rays of Raza’ by S.H.Raza.

These will be showcased at Barclays Wealth’s Brook Street offices on 10th and 11th December and then move to the Mayfair gallery of Tanya Baxter Contemporary and Kings Road Gallery until 31st January 2010.

The bank said: “A recent change is that whilst Indian art had been bought almost entirely by Indian collectors (mainly based outside India), it is now increasingly being collected by non-Indians.”

Elswhere, HSBC Private Bank has hosted a lunch to launch The Connection Collection by Israeli-born European designer Arik Levy, which will be showcased at Design Miami/, the International art fair, next week. Following Design Miami/, Arik Levy’s installation will be displayed at HSBC Private Bank offices in Geneva.

Tony Joyce, global head of marketing at HSBC Private Bank, said: “Our clients are increasingly interested in important design and our research has shown that they support our partnership with the Design Miami/ events.”

German Deutsche Bank said it had signed a five-year sponsorship contract with ART HK, the three year old Hong Kong-based art fair.

ART HK will take place from May 27 to May 30 next year and expects over 110 galleries from 24 countries to attend. It was originally sponsored by defunct investment bank Lehman Brothers for its debut in 2008. This year it had no lead sponsor.

“Our sponsorship of ART HK reflects the importance and the growth of Deutsche Bank’s operations in the Asia-Pacific region,” the bank. “The successes of ART HK in 2008 and 2009 show the high demand for a world-class art fair in the region.”

Pop art has been riding the fast lane for some time now. Each passing day this art stream is getting more and more popular. What used to be desi and uncool yesterday is uber cool today.The modern take on the Indianness is chic and stylish. Perspectives have changed. People are happy to bring back the Indian street flavour into their everyday lives through the route of home décor, garments and accessories. Today brand “India” is larger than life and everyone wants to own a piece of this India, even if it is in a very small way.

At this juncture, our inexpensive products are surging to the forefront instantly. There is now a huge demand for little bric-a-bracs such as kitsch note books, keychains, badges, coasters, fashionable bags and shoes and even furniture and products of home decor such as cushions, trays and curtains and so on, which are direct translations of our colourful streets.

We have already, for long, seen graphic artists and designers romancing the autorickshaw or three-wheelers. Today, we have a wider range of street imagery being translated onto various fashion and lifestyle arena. It is all about creating something that makes you want to own a part of India.

Scenes from congested streets and little nooks and corners of a chaotic busy bustling day double up as meaty imagery for such art. The jungle of archaic telephone wiring atop a cobweb-laden dusty pillar and small shops displaying colourful inexpensive plastic products tucked away somewhere in the lanes of Chandni Chowk in Old Delhi Paharganj add to the data bank of our graphic designers. Or old dilapidated buildings and film posters pasted on these chipped walls. All these tell a crazy, colourful story about our ‘Imperfect India’, which is so perfect!

Bollywood is the biggest kitsch flavour that “brand India” has in its big bag of enticing goodies. Though explored and re-explored to the fullest, amazingly there is still room for more exploration and reinvention. This season, when I started working on my new collection around Bollywood, I was struck by the scarcity of a serious brand that can bring out the madness of this colourful world of filmy kitsch, and there began my saga with rosy-cheeked actors popping out of film hoardings of yesteryears finding a comfortable spot on a wide range of products — which no one needs to aspire to possess.

The whole idea of kitsch Indian art should be affordability and the “within reach” factor that promotes “brand India” through the masses. More than enticing the foreigners, our idea should be to have Indian buyers inculcate the feeling of wanting to possess that little part of India that has been replaced by westernisation.

we find it fascinating how people look for someone to change their perspectives. Today, people are waiting for someone to come by and help them see Indianness in a new light. Riding the tide of the same pulse, several brands have cropped up with their interpretations of this same Indianness. It is indeed a pleasure to know that our culture and our old dusty streets still fascinate creative minds.

Only a month ago – well after the Crisis had kicked off – Forbes was breathlessly reportingthat some billionaires had managed – inadvertently or otherwise – to ‘hedge’ their balance sheets by investing in fine art. Eli Broad, for example, had lost approximately $2 billion in his equities portfolio over the previous year, the magazine reported, but the ‘soaring value’ of his art collection (it increased by $1.9b in the same time, according to a recent appraisal) had nearly made up for it.

Well, I’ve got some bad news for Mr Broad and anyone else with art on the balance sheet. Based on last week’s auction results (and last month’s in London), collectors should be marking down the value of their holdings by roughly 40 percent – which, as it happens, parallels the year-to-date losses on the Dow Jones Industrial Average (down 37 percent since this time last year) and the S&P 500 Index (down 42 percent for the same period).

While the contemporary art auctions in New York last week were not the bloodbaths that some had feared (or hoped for) — Christie’s and Sotheby’s sold 68 percent of the lots in their evening sales (but only 54 percent and 43 percent by value, respectively) — one thing should now be perfectly clear: art is not the strategic investment it has been widely proclaimed to be.

It wasn’t supposed to happen this way. According to the money magazines, the art-investment fund advisors and the auction houses, art was supposed to be a ‘safe’ alternative to equities, because the ‘returns’ on art had a negative correlation to returns on stocks, meaning that in an economic downturn you might take a bath on your stock portfolio, but the value of your art collection would hold up (or at least long enough for the economy to pull through and for the equity markets to rise again). As Citi Private Bank’s Suzanne Gyorgy told The Business Times last month, when there is a decline in equities, investors will turn to tangible assets and the art market will see a ‘bump’ in value, ‘counter-cyclical to the equities markets’.

Unfortunately an overwhelming number of art market analyses have been relying solely on the conclusions provided by the Mei Moses Fine Art Index. The Fine Art Index compiles ‘art market returns’ (which are derived by looking at works that have sold multiple times at auction) and compares them to the S&P, concluding, primarily, that when the stock market skids, the art market won’t follow suit for another 18-24 months. And sure enough, the last art-market peak came two years after 1987′s ‘Black Monday’. But looked at from a Japanese perspective, there’s no such lag: just as the art market was peaking, so did the Nikkei, which to this day has not returned to its high of 29 December 1989. When the stock market of the world’s biggest art collectors went into freefall, the art market immediately followed. In short, the art market doesn’t trail, and neither is it ‘counter-cyclical’, particularly today, when the bulk of the buyers are far more reliant on wealth that in many instances exists only on paper (and can disappear very rapidly).

Yet no one has been more enamoured of applying financial lingo in the service of increasing prices for contemporary art than the auction houses. Based on recent statements, Tobias Meyer (Sotheby’s Worldwide Head of Contemporary Art) and Amy Cappellazzo (International Co-Head for Christie’s Contemporary Art Department) seemed to believe that art at the high end was not just a good alternative to stocks, but close to bullet-proof. As Meyer told Forbes in October, ‘There is an enormous amount of cash out there for very limited [numbers of] works of art… It’s the golden ratio for any market: limited supply, unlimited demand…. The high, high end will get more expensive.’ Of course, Meyer just presided over a sale where demand was not only limited, a mere six works managed to meet their low estimates. And this past April, Cappellazzo, participating in an Artforum panel, told the audience, ‘Warhol’s market trades like currency — it is the most efficient market there is… If you execute the trade at the right level… the market will absorb it all at all levels. It is a perfect market, really.’ Based on the results for Warhol this week (13 percent sold by value at Christie’s), that market isn’t so perfect after all. Can we all now agree that having a painting of a dollar sign isn’t the same thing as having dollars?

None of this is to say that there aren’t good deals on art out there. Just like in the stock and real estate markets, there are works available right now whose value will increase, if not soar. But the thing is, those values are going to peak in tandem with the next run-up in global wealth. Gone are the days of the geographic and financial isolation of art collectors, and gone too is the ‘alternative’ of art as an asset.