There was something about the way Souza sought to make the world his own, appearing fleetingly in his furious brushstrokes, cross-hatched lines and burnished outlines, that was at once earnest and vain, urgent and mocking. Souza was not the first to advocate the power of the image. The cave painters of Lascaux believed in it, Picasso referred to it. Souza, the ‘enfant terrible’, the Byronic hero, only reasserted it with a shrill note of desperation.

Born in Goa, he was the incorrigible rebel who was expelled from his school in 1937, from Sir J J School of Art in 1945 and from his country in 1949 (or so he insisted), who waged a war against the world wearing the ‘protective armour of beauty’. He waged his war against painting too, ‘attacking it as if it were an ugly reptile’ and God, who made ‘life both possible and impossible’.

For an early modernist like Souza the search for an artistic language was not an easy one. He combed the history of Chinese, Indian, African and Persian art in his search for a painterly voice. Moving to England in the 1950s, he combined the Expressionism of Rouault and Soutine, the spirit of enquiry of Cubism and the full-bodied sculptures of classical Indian tradition, to make his landscapes, crucifixes, nudes, amorous couples, popes, priests and still-lives. Line was his forte combined with cruel wit. What Souza said and left unsaid in his paintings were penned on to paper. When Nirvana of a Maggot appeared in 1955 in a magazine edited by Stephen Spender, it catapulted Souza into fame. His other book Words and Lines was published in London in 1959. He left for the United States and settled in New York in 1967. Souza participated in the Commonwealth Artists of Fame exhibition in London in 1977 and has had several exhibitions including one-man shows in Paris in 1954 and 1960 and in Detroit in 1968. His retrospectives were held in New Delhi and Mumbai in 1987 and a show at the Indus Gallery in Karachi in 1988. A large retrospective was once again held in New Delhi in 1996.

In 2005 the Tate Britain dedicated a room to Souza’s works as part of their British Art Collection.

Souza passed away in 2002.