Souza’s artistic evolution was not shaped by painters alone. While Picasso informed his visual language, it was Franz Kafka who gave form to his inner unrest. The influence of Kafka—never examined as part of Souza’s oeuvre—runs deep through his art and writings.
Kafka’s Metamorphosis (1915), in which Gregor Samsa awakens to find himself transformed into a giant insect, struck a deep, unnerving chord in Souza. The grotesque body, and the estrangement from family and society—these were not just literary devices for Souza, but emotional truths. As a committed communist, he found Kafka’s allegory of the working class not only relatable but defining.
In 1955 Souza’s autobiographical short story The Nirvana of a Maggot was published in Encounter magazine by Stephen Spender, cementing his growing reputation not just as a painter but also a writer. In this piece, Souza described his origin as a “maggot on a dung heap,” —a direct nod to Kafka’s Metamorphosis.
What was I originally? I was a blooming maggot on a dung heap. That’s exactly from where I originated. That has been my breeding ground. My childhood has been insipid, like an undigested bit of straw. I still have the taste of dung in my mouth.
F.N. Souza, Nirvana of a Maggot, 1955
Souza’s Kafkaesque outlook, forged through literature, found its visual equivalent in a series of increasingly grotesque, transformative images. Nude Metamorphosed Into Insect (1957) is a startling example. Here, a figure caught mid-mutation lunges outward, part human, part insect, its body stretched in an impossible gesture of escape. The canvas is a site of psychological unrest, echoing Gregor Samsa’s lonely devolution and Souza’s lifelong preoccupations with exile, rejection, and identity.
F.N. Souza, Nude Metamorphosed into Insect, 1957
Credits: Artist's Estate
Many of Souza’s portraits from this period incorporate distorted anatomies and insectile features, often fused with mask-like faces that recall African sculpture and Kafka’s vision of the human turned monstrous. Even his Six Gentlemen of Our Times series may find echoes in Kafka’s “Three Bearded Gentlemen”—silent bureaucratic figures who watch without empathy as Samsa decays.
F.N. Souza, Metamorphosis, 1968
Credits: Artist’s Estate
Souza did not merely seek greatness; he clawed through degradation, wrestled with the monstrous, and unearthed meaning from decay. Kafka gave this internal struggle its clearest, most enduring language.
