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PROPERTY FROM THE COLLECTION OF MR. K.B. GOEL, ART CRITIC: Four chemical works by Francis Newton Souza from the Private Collection of the distinguished art critic K.B. Goel Lots 262-265 Francis Newton Souza (Indian, 1924-2002), Three Portraits, Chemical Alteration and Acrylic on Magazine Paper, each dated and signed, upper left, Souza 93; Souza 1984; Souza 85; mounted, framed and glazed, each head 20.3 x 26.7cm. Provenance: The Private Collection of Dr. Premlata Goel, widow of the distinguished art critic K.B. Goel (1930-2018) to whom this work was gifted by the artist in the mid-1980s. In an article in the Times of India, Delhi in August 1990, distinguished art critic K.B. Goel described Souza's chemical works as ‘pictures of things taken from glossy art magazines ... defaced and chemically altered, they achieve a new emotional and personal content...’. ‘Their closeness to print culture demands that they are read as a self-apparent play of graffiti space. They also speak of how the artist's whimsies have transparent windows and how we ourselves enjoy looking through them to admire the compositional sense of how the game is played. It is the same old game Souza is adept at, one which allows him to break (down) our inhibitions and undo our muscle-bound understanding’. The two men had, by then, been friends for many years as Souza related in a letter to Goel from New York, 20 October, 1976, ‘My friendship with you goes back to early 1965 when I was in Delhi, just married, on a honeymoon with my seventeen-year-old bride, and you used to accompany us to the melas (festivals) etc. and show us the city, and we’d talk of all kinds of things. I had noted that your writing in Thought on art - you had written an article on me - was the best of its kind’. Souza’s great affection for the Goel family was materially demonstrated by a number of his remarkable works which he gifted to them. When, from the 1970s, Souza decided to ‘return’ to India almost every year, Goel became a close friend and wrote about this provocative artist with fervour and forthright confidence: ‘Souza’s frontier-jumping acts, his extremisms, his readiness to shock the audience, and if the audience is ready for it, his readiness for the next: so his antics, the love of the irony and his Dali-like bluntness and cantankerous honesty. Souza’s egotistical, almost condescending superiority exhibits the old kind of consciousness which is princely as if it were part of a throne, issuing from a centre without a margin’ (‘The Fall of Man and Other Images’, p. 70). 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 failing health in his later years, he died in January 2018. A book on his critical writings was posthumously published in 2020. Many thanks to Simon Brandenburger, a friend of the Goel family, for his contribution to this entry