Francis Newton Souza’s Black Paintings: Postwar Transactions in Color

Abstract

For the South Asian artist Francis Newton Souza (1924–2000), the color black—redolent with achromatic intensity, controverted in color theory, resonant with political potentiality—mattered. Preoccupied with the color from 1954, Souza completed a series of over fifty monochromatic black paintings in 1965. What meaning did the color have for the then London-based artist? In postwar art, the color black remained associated with infinity, spirituality, and transcendence. In contrast, situating blackness at the intersections of decolonization, Négritude, and civil rights movements tracks a contrapuntal politics and poetics of the color through Souza’s black paintings.