Francis Newton Souza was the outspoken leader of The Progressives in Bombay. What were his experimental works mainly focused on?
Answer & explanation
Correct answer: option 3
The correct answer is Option (3) → Women
Option (1) Landscapes — Incorrect. Landscape was a favourite theme of S. H. Raza, who moved towards abstraction.
Option (2) Indian mythology — Incorrect. M. F. Husain, not Souza, drew from Indian mythology and religious sources.
Option (3) Women — Correct. Souza’s experimental works focused mainly on women, painted as nudes with exaggerated proportions.
Option (4) Abstract designs — Incorrect. Abstraction was the path of Raza and later Gaitonde, not of Souza.
Note: This topic was not named in the CUET 2026 syllabus, but it was part of the NCERT chapter. In 2025 and 2026, NTA also asked questions on topics in NCERT that the CUET syllabus did not name. So our mocks have questions from every part of the NCERT chapter, to give you enough practice. Read the whole chapter, not only the sub-topics named in the syllabus.
NCERT (2026-27): “The Progressive Artists’ Group of Bombay and the Multifaceted Indian Art …Francis Newton Souza was the outspoken leader of the group, which included M. F. Husain, K. H. Ara, S. A. Bakre, H. A. Gade and S. H. Raza. Souza wanted to question the conventions that had prevailed in art schools. For him, modern art stood for a new freedom that could challenge the traditional sense of beauty and morality. However, his experimental works were focused mainly on women, whom he painted as nudes, exaggerating their proportions and breaking the standard notions of beauty.” |