In a diametrically opposite style, Lucian Freud, the grandson of Sigmund Freud, scrutinises the human being in all his fleshy, even bloated, existence, revealing the torment that lies within, in what could be described as a perpetuation of Freud's psychoanalytical methods by artistic means.
F.N. Souza: Head
Francis Newton Souza, whose work reached its apogee while he lived in London in the '50s, is best known for his inhuman heads with eyes placed over the forehead and gnashing teeth made with slashing, stabbing strokes. Many of his flayed Christ figures emerged from his childhood experience of a rigid, hypocritical Roman Catholic Church and society in his birthplace, Goa. Influenced by Bacon in his eroticised violence as much as in the use of photographs to study anatomy, Souza also unveiled sexual hypocrisy in his voluptuously nude women.
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Tyeb Mehta: Falling Figure
All the angst of existence was conveyed by Tyeb Mehta's falling figures, while his fragmented forms which remain intact while suspended in tension symbolise survival against great odds—imagery born out of his experience of Partition. In his Mahishasura images of the goddess Kali locked in battle with the buffalo demon, Mehta was to continue with his brooding forms which were as much harbingers of destruction as well as of its detoxication. In focusing on the buffalo demon Mahishasura, he also depicted an interlocking of the masculine and feminine, the divine and the mortal, the bestial and the human in perpetual coexistence.
The art of the grotesque is masterfully articulated by these iconic artists through their diverse images. But if their works have an ominous ring for the present, they also bring awareness of a dormant humanity which needs to be jolted back to life.
