Page 53 - Studio International - May 1966

quainted with the art of his country in the libraries of The genesis of these coloured compositions is interesting.
Bombay, Rama Rao in the British Museum! In a kind of passing tribute to Pop art, he draws his
Of the three, Geoffrey has most completely absorbed the inspiration from magazine photos. When he has worked
western style, or to be precise the international style, which them up into a composition they have lost all reference
may loosely be called abstract expressionism. Souza con- to their source; they are no longer Pop but transformed
forms to no one style. He is eclectic. As he says, rather by Souza's astringent style. Sometimes they are so trans-
unconvincingly, 'As for art, I can confidently say that I formed that they have become almost totally abstract.
am not influenced by anybody, and I am not experi- But when this happens, it is because he has used a simple
menting.' (Words and Lines p. 8.) He has, in fact, been device: he turns the photo upside down and explores
strongly influenced by Picasso, Soutine, Van Gogh, and forms from that angle. CI am not experimenting' !)
also by Goya and El Greco. I find a strong Spanish I find these compositions too reminiscent of Picasso and
flavour in his work. I do not refer to the intensely expres- Soutine for comfort. The black paintings are more im-
sive religious imagery with which we have become pressive. (If they suggest Ad Reinhart, they are not due
familiar, but to those two aspects of Spanish feeling, the to his influence, and are quite different in intention.)
dark, sombre, serious, and the bright, gay, highly They are like black stained-glass windows, the forms out-
coloured. These two have become clearly defined in his lined in thick lines like leading. As you move before them
recent work. This can be divided into a series, over two and different facets catch the light, they vary in tone,
hundred, of black canvases, and a number of rather ab- texture (like black velvet) and colour (not only blacks
stract compositions in strong colour. and greys, but impressions of purples and indigo). Some
of them are beautifully composed, but the bite and pathos
of the religious paintings is missing. Souza is a painter
who is at his best when he has a statement to make. I feel
that at present he has said all he had to say on one subject
and is still in search of another.
In 1962 Iqbal Geoffrey went to the United States. There
he began the series of quasi-abstract landscapes called
The great American landscape which won him the award of
Mention Honorifique in Paris last year. Since then he
has done another landscape series, In search of an ideal
landscape and, to my mind his most successful work to
date, a series of canvases (previously he painted on paper
or cardboard) called Epitaphs for the dreams I had to-
morrow.
After coming to England, Geoffrey spent some time at
St Ives, and his suggestion of the American landscape, its
vastness, its bending, sweeping rivers, its aridity, bears
certain resemblances to Lanyon's treatment of the Corn-
ish coast. He employs the bold gesture, the slap-happy
application of paint, with its splatter and drip, of the
abstract expressionist. Herbert Read has said of his style
that it retains some suggestion of oriental richness and
spirituality. Both these qualities are there, particularly in
his latest works, but, in spite of the presence of texts in
Urdu script, it is not more noticeably oriental than the
work of, say, Mark Tobey. This, however, raises an
interesting point.
Abstract expressionism, especially on the West Coast,
has been influenced by the east, by oriental calligraphy,
the application of paint in washes, and, above all, the
contemplative attitude to nature. Was it this which at-
tracted Geoffrey to abstract expressionism or did he, as
Read says, bring these elements with him from his own
experience of art in India? It is not hard to find Indian
painting which bears a striking, if perhaps superficial,
resemblance to contemporary western painting. But if
Geoffrey retains something of the orient, then one is faced
with a paradox; for, in comparison with the American
landscapes, his recent work is far more oriental in feeling.

F. N. Souza
Black Pope 1965
Oil on canvas 30 x 40 in.