Horror. That’s the feeling Ranjit Hoskote remembers experiencing, when he first encountered Francis Newton Souza’s Death of a Pope (oil on canvas, 1962) several years ago. To him, the satirical painting, which Souza (1924-2002) reimagined from a black and white photograph of the deceased Pope Pius XII lying in state at St Peter’s Basilica, Vatican, on October 11, 1958, surrounded by his collegium of ecclesiastical mourners seemed to be a rather, “savage and cruel take on a solemn moment”.  Needless to say, the painting left a deep impression on him. As a cultural theorist and curator, Hoskote kept returning to the artwork, each time he investigated Souza the artist, notorious for his appetite for provocation. It began with Aparanta: The Confluence of Contemporary Art in Goa, a landmark group exhibition that he curated in Panjim in 2007, where he turned the spotlight on Goa’s artists in their ancestral land. This was followed by a furious exercise of collecting and making notes on the peripatetic painter, somewhere in 2012. We are in 2021, when we meet Hoskote at the Jehangir Nicholson Art Foundation, Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Vastu Sanghralaya, just days before the opening of With FN Souza: The Power and the Glory. The walls are still a work in progress, but Souza’s paintings have already found a pride of place here. He admits that the passage of time hardly restrained his curiosity for the painter. “It was one of my unrealised dream projects.”

Francis Newton Souza’s Death of a Pope (oil on canvas, 1962) is based on a black and white photograph of the deceased Pope Pius XII lying in state at St Peter’s Basilica, Vatican, on October 11, 1958, surrounded by his collegium of ecclesiastical mourners. In Souza’s painting, the men surrounding the Pope are shown as scarred and monstrous figures. Several of them are distorted to resemble Hitler. Pics/Suresh Karkera