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Tagore's Advice: The Critical Fortune and Misfortune of the Goan Painter Angelo da Fonseca (1902–1967)

2012; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 35; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/00856401.2012.687806

1479-0270

Paulo Varela Gomes,

Indian History and Philosophy

Abstract This essay argues that the building of Angelo da Fonseca's critical fortune as a Christian artist from the 1930s to the 1950s was simultaneously and necessarily the building of his later misfortune and oblivion as a modern artist. Angelo da Fonseca was characterised as a Catholic painter during the first half of the twentieth century after the advice to ‘paint churches’ purportedly given to him by Rabindranath Tagore (or perhaps his nephew, Abanindranath Tagore). At the time, there was a generalised movement for the creation of a new Christian art involving many artists from all over the world. They too have vanished from art history's printed memory. This was due to modernism's exclusion of Christianity as a subject, which made it impossible for historians and critics to deal with twentieth-century Christian art. This, it will be argued, eventually led to a further exclusion: Indian Christian art was seen as simultaneously un-modern and un-Indian and was, therefore, omitted from the process played by the arts in India's nation-building. Keywords: ArtIndiaCatholicismmodernismGoaFonseca Notes 1 Partha Mitter, The Triumph of Modernism: India's Artists and the Avant-Garde, 1922–47 (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2007). This follows Mitter's previous compendium, Art and Nationalism in Colonial India, 1850–1922, Occidental Orientations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). 2 Gayatri Sinha (ed.), Art and Visual Culture in India 1857–2007 (Mumbai: Marg Publications, 2009). This collection follows a less consequential one by the same editor and many of the same authors. See Gayatri Sinha (ed.), Indian Art, an Overview (New Delhi: Rupa & Co., 2003). 3 See the Pilar Seminary commemorative publication, Euntes Docete, Vol.7 (2002–03) (Goa: Pilar Theological Seminary, 2002); also see the catalogue of the Aparanta art exhibition organised by the Goa Tourism Development Corporation held in Goa in April 2007. 4 The largest existing collection of Angelo da Fonseca's works is held in the Xavier Centre of Historical Studies, a Goan Jesuit institution. The Xavier Centre also keeps an extensive bibliography of the artist and many original documents (newspaper clippings, photographs, etc.). Catalogues in the collection show many images of Fonseca's paintings and drawings, the whereabouts of which are unknown. Some of these works are, to my view, instrumental in understanding Fonseca's art and I reproduce some images in this paper. I thank the Xavier Centre and its former director, Dr. Délio Mendonça SJ, who is conducting a thorough research of the life and work of Angelo da Fonseca, for all the facilities given to me when I worked there. 5 A similar argument has been made about one of India's earliest feminists, Pandita Ramabai (1858–1922), who converted to Christianity, curiously enough through the Anglican missionaries in Pune. See Uma Chakravarti, Rewriting History: The Life and Times of Pandita Ramabai (New Delhi: Kali for Women, 1998), who argues that Ramabai was sidelined by dominant Hindu and Indian nationalist opinion because she was a Christian. See in particular the Introduction, pp.viii ff. 6 Cosme José Costa, ‘Angelo da Fonseca, a Profile’, in Euntes Docete, Vol.7 (2002–03), pp.9–22. Also see Cosme José Costa, ‘Angelo da Fonseca—Devotion in Swadeshi Art’, in Parmal, no.3 (2004), pp.77–85. 7 The first of these autobiographical texts, frequently misquoted, is Angelo da Fonseca, ‘Indo-Christian Art in Painting and Statuary, a Historical Retrospect’, in Indica. The Indian Historical Institute Silver Jubilee Commemoration Volume (Mumbai: St Xavier's College, 1953), pp.138–53. See Angelo da Fonseca, ‘An Approach to the Understanding of “Christian Art” in India’, in Euntes Docete, Vol.7 (2002–03), pp.154–8, a text that the editors state had never been published before. It was written after 1958 because Fonseca refers to Cardinal Celso Costantini as having already died, and this happened in 1958 (see Footnote 9). Excerpts of a letter written by Angelo da Fonseca, dated October 1937, appear in an article written in 1938 by Celso Costantini: ‘Arte Cristiana Indiana’, published in Portuguese in the Goan newspaper A Vida (20, 21 & 22 April 1939), in a translation from its original publication in Arte Cristiana (Milan); A Vida published the same article again on 23, 25 & 28 October 1958 under the title ‘A Contribuição do Artista Goês Angelo da Fonseca para a obra da Cristianização da India foi posta em Relevo pelo Cardeal Celso Costantini’ (‘The Contribution of the Goan Artist Angelo da Fonseca for the Christianisation of India Highlighted by Cardinal Celso Costantini’). This article represents the newspaper's homage to Costantini, who had just died. Finally, this same article was published in a very poor English translation, truncated and confusedly ascribed to a translation from an article in the Osservatore Romano (!), in Euntes Docete, Vol.7 (2002–03), pp.73–83. Other texts by Fonseca, possibly letters, were quoted without reference by M.R. Lederle SJ in ‘The Inner Inspiration. Angelo da Fonseca’, in Goa, Cultural Patterns (Bombay: Marg Publications, 1983), pp.121–4. 8 A.D. Lobo, ‘Christian Art in India, Its Pioneer Angelo da Fonseca’, in The Examiner (Bombay) (13 July 1957). I was only able to consult a typescript copy of this article in the library of the Xavier Centre of Historical Research. 9 Matthew Lederle, ‘Christian Artists in India in the Modern Period’, in Christian Painting in India through the Centuries (Bombay: Heras Institute of Indian History and Culture, undated; the preface indicates that it was printed in 1986), pp.71–80. 10 Costa, ‘Angelo da Fonseca, a Profile’, pp.9–22. The story is referred to in A.D. Lobo's article in The Examiner. 11 The dates for Celso Costantini, here published for the first time in writings referring to Angelo da Fonseca, are given in a short obituary published in A Vida (23 Oct. 1958), less than a week after his death on 17 Oct. 1958. 12 See George Kearney, ‘The Changing Face of Patna Province’ [http://www.jesuits-chi.org/publications/Partners/Partners_spring_2005/SP05_Changing_Patna.pdf, accessed 3 Oct. 2010]. 13 Fonseca, ‘Indo-Christian Art in Painting and Statuary’, pp.138–53. 14 The full designation of this ashram is spelt in many different ways as often happens when words are transliterated from the Devnagri to the Roman script. 15 Fonseca, ‘Indo-Christian Art in Painting and Statuary’, pp.138–53. 16 Lederle, ‘Christian Artists in India in the Modern Period’, pp.73–4. 17 There is, by contrast, a great deal of recent writing about Anglican missions throughout the world, but mostly referring to the nineteenth century. In the case of India, see Judith M. Brown and Robert Eric Frykenberg (eds), Christians, Cultural Interactions and India's Religious Traditions (Grand Rapids & Cambridge: William B. Eerdmans Publishing, 2002). The essay by Susan Billington Harper in this collection, ‘The Dornakal Church on the Cultural Frontier’, pp.183–211, is particularly relevant for the issues raised in this paper. 18 See Celso Costantini, L'Arte Cristiana nelle Missioni (Rome: Tipografia Poliglotta Vaticana, 1940). 19 Fonseca, ‘Indo-Christian Art in Painting and Statuary’, pp.138–53. 20 The reference to the publication of the Annunciation in The Bengalese is given by Costantini in his Arte Cristiana of 1938. 21 Reference in Lederle, ‘Christian Artists in India in the Modern Period’, pp.71–80. 22 Sepp Schuller, Angelo da Fonseca, India's Catholic Artist (Aachen: Missionary Museum, 1938). 23 See Mitter, The Triumph of Modernism, pp.114–22. 24 The preface to Son of Man is by Anglican Bishop Walter Carey. It is dated 1939, a fact that probably indicates that the printing of the book was postponed to 1946 due to the outbreak of World War II. 25 Alison Carroll, The Revolutionary Century. Art in Asia, 1900–2000 (South Yarra: Macmillan Australia, 2010). See p.63 for the image. 26 Fonseca, ‘Indo-Christian Art in Painting and Statuary’. 27 Costantini, L'Arte Cristiana nelle Missioni. This book includes most of the references made to Fonseca in Costantini's earlier article of 1938. See pp.272–5. 28 The dates for Masoji are given in Lederle, ‘Christian Artists in India in the Modern Period’. 29 S.V. Gorakshkar, ‘The Christ Theme in Indian Art’, in The Illustrated Weekly of India (24 Dec. 1967). 30 Lederle gives the list of places where Fonseca would have exhibited in 1948 and in 1950 in ‘The Inner Inspiration’, pp.121–4. Individual exhibitions—those of 1948—and collective ones (1950) are thus confused. Lisbon does not appear in the list for the first year. 31 See, for example, Father Van Gonechten, ‘Fichas dos Pintores Cristianos en la China Moderna’, in Lumen, Vol.6 (1952), pp.12–3, which is about the way in which Catholic missionaries decided to give Christian art in China a Chinese identity in the early 1920s. According to this article, which shows Father Van Gonechten giving the last brushstrokes to one of his paintings, the art of the Tang dynasty would be preferable to Sung art as a model for the new Christian art because Sung art would be too ‘poetic’ and not sufficiently religious. Also see the Goan magazine, Miss[otilde]es, no.6 (1955), containing images of works by Fonseca and also by several Japanese Christian artists, with scenes from the New Testament in Japanese settings. 32 Fonseca, ‘Indo-Christian Art in Painting and Statuary’. 33 Ibid. 34 One is also made to wonder if Fonseca had read the famous prose of the Goan Indian nationalist (or freedom fighter) T.B. Cunha, Denationalisation of Goans (Bombay: Goa Congress Committee, 1944), where much the same argument is made. 35 Rochelle Pinto, Between Empires. Print and Politics in Goa (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2007), is, to some extent, a history of Goa's upper-class perceptions and construction of its own identity in the nineteenth century. 36 To my view, the most comprehensive book published so far about the Portugal–India conflict and the state of affairs in Goa in the 1950s is Sandrine Bégue, La Fin de Goa et de l’ ‘Estado da Índia’: Décolonisation et Guerre Froide dans le Sous-continent Indien (1945–1962), Vols1 & 2 (Lisbon, Instituto Diplomático, 2007). 37 This is of course a simplification of a highly complex and very controversial history. The secondary sources are vast, in several languages, all of them far from impartial. It is with embarrassment—and the feeling that I am doing an injustice to the cause of the Padroado—that I quote only two titles in English: M. de Sá, The History of the Diocese of Damaun (Bombay: n.n., 1924); and Ernest R. Hull, Bombay Mission-History (Bombay: The Examiner Press, 1927). The second book leans towards the Propaganda faction and is much better written and argued. 38 The Propaganda's connections to the ‘new initiative’ are another possible reason for some Goans' negative reaction to Fonseca's art. Most authors explain that their reaction is due to Fonseca's ‘Indianised’ Christian visual culture, something upper-caste Catholics found difficult to swallow. For this point of view on the rejection of Fonseca's art, see Savia Viegas, ‘Painting the Madonna Brown’, in Himal Southasian (August 2010) [http://www.himalmag.com/Painting-the-Madonna-brown_nw4644.html, accessed 21 Nov. 2010]. To my view, Fonseca's art was also poorly received by some Goans, and by Goans in Mumbai, as a consequence of his national (Indian) and inner-Church allegiances. 39 Kobena Mercer (ed.), Cosmopolitan Modernisms (London: Institute of International Visual Arts, and Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2005). 40 Mitter, The Triumph of Modernism, p.8. There is now a vast bibliographical panorama concerning the debate on the ‘variable geometry’ of modernism, or the often rabid critique of the supposedly Eurocentric use of the concept. It all spins, either explicitly or implicitly, around Jürgen Habermas' work. See, for instance, his The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1987) for the English version, or Religion and Rationality. Essays on Reason, God and Modernity (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2002). As examples of the debate, prior to the collection of essays edited by Mercer quoted in the previous footnote, see Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar (ed.), Alternative Modernities (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001); Dipesh Chakrabarty, Habitations of Modernity: Essays in the Wake of Subaltern Studies (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002); and Anthony D. King, Spaces of Global Cultures: Architecture, Urbanism, Identity (New York: Routledge, 2004), in particular pp.65–81. 41 This point had already been elaborated by Mitter in his Art and Nationalism in Colonial India. Interestingly, in his 2005 interview with Kobena Mercer, Mitter considered the avant-garde anti-naturalism of modernism as its birthmark par excellence. Colonial naturalism is partially readmitted into the bosom of modernism in Mitter's The Triumph of Modernism. Also see Tapati Guha-Thakurta, The Making of a ‘New’ Indian Art: Artists, Aesthetics and Nationalism in Bengal, 1850–1920 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), and Geeta Kapur, When was Modernism? Essays on Contemporary Cultural Practice in India (New Delhi: Tulika, 2000). 42 Carroll, The Revolutionary Century, p.15. 43 On the Mughal codes of representation, see Ebba Koch, Mughal Art and Imperial Ideology (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2001). 44 See, among many other possible titles, three books by Gauvin Bailey: Art and the Jesuit Missions in Asia and Latin America, 1542–1773 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991); The Jesuits and the Grand Mogul: Renaissance Art at the Imperial Court of India, 1580–1630 (Washington, DC: Freer Gallery of Art, Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, 1998); and ‘The Truth-Showing Mirror: Jesuit Catechism and the Arts in Mughal India’, in John W. O'Malley, SJ, Gauvin Alexander Bailey, Steven J. Harris, and T. Frank Kennedy, SJ (eds), The Jesuits: Cultures, Sciences and the Arts, 1540–1773 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999), pp.380–401. 45 See R. Siva Kumar, ‘Santiniketan, a Development in Three Movements’, in Gayatri Sinha (ed.), Art and Visual Culture in India (1857–2007) (Mumbai: Marg Publications, 2009), pp.112–5. 46 See Sanjoy Mallik, ‘Social Realism in the Visual Arts: “Man-Made” Famine and Political Ferment, Bengal 1943–46’, in Gayatri Sinha (ed.), Art and Visual Culture in India (1857–2007) (Mumbai: Marg Publications, 2009), pp.150–61. 47 See http://www.guggenheim.org/new-york/exhibitions/on-view/chaos-and-classicism, accessed 2 Oct. 2010. 48 See http://www.artservis.org/izpis_dogodka.asp?hF=2795, accessed 2 Oct. 2010. 49 For Abanindranath Tagore, see R. Siva Kumar, Abanindranath Tagore (Kolkata: Pratikshan, 2008); and Tapati Guha-Thakurta, ‘Abanindranath, Known and Unknown. The Artist Versus the Art of His Times’, in Gayatri Sinha (ed.), Art and Visual Culture in India (1857–2007) (Mumbai: Marg Publications, 2009), pp.84–103. 50 Guha-Thakurta, ‘Abanindranath, Known and Unknown’, p.85. 51 Reproduced in ibid., p.87. 52 Ibid, p.91; and Carroll, The Revolutionary Century, p.76. 53 Guha-Thakurta, ‘Abanindranath, Known and Unknown’, p.98. 54 Kumar, ‘Santiniketan, a Development in Three Movements’, pp.104–17. 55 John Alff, ‘Temples of Light: Bombay's Art Deco Cinemas and the Birth of the Modern Myth’, in Pauline Rohatgi, Pherosa Godrej and Rahul Mehrotra (eds), Bombay to Mumbai. Changing Perspectives (Mumbai: Marg Publications, 1998), pp.250–7. 56 Gérard Schurr, Les Petits Maitres de la Peinture valeur de demain 1820–1920 (Paris: Les Editions de l'Amateur, 1975); also see Edward Lucie-Smith, Art Deco Painting (London: Phaidon, 1990). 57 Fonseca did, nevertheless, highlight the success of the Anno Santo collective exhibition of 1950 also held in Lisbon. This highlighting, however, was done cum grano salis: ‘The Exhibition [in Rome] was so much appreciated by all the visitors that the Government of Spain first, and then the Government of Portugal, invited the Exhibition to be held in their respective capitals’ (emphasis added). See Fonseca, ‘Indo-Christian Art in Painting and Statuary’. 58 See the news items published in the government-oriented Diário de Notícias (29 Dec. 1948) and also in many other newspapers in Lisbon and other Portuguese cities, both government and non-aligned: Diário da Manhã (28 Dec. 1948); Novidades (28 Dec. 1948); Diário Popular (28 Dec. 1948 with a reproduction of Supper at Emmaus); Diário de Coimbra (29 Dec. 1948); O Primeiro de Janeiro (30 Dec. 1948); Republica (31 Dec. 1948); Século Ilustrado (8 Jan. 1949); etc. 59 Fonseca was the object of a public homage organised by Goans at the prestigious Sociedade de Geografia de Lisboa. See A Voz (9 July 1949). On 13 July 1949, the newspaper, Diário de Lisboa, announced that Fonseca was about to leave for Madrid, Barcelona, Paris and Brussels and was, therefore, the object of a farewell dinner by admirers at a Lisbon restaurant (Adega da Lucília), where curry was served (caril, the Portuguese ignoramus' word for Indian food). 60 J-A. França, A Arte em Portugal no século XX (Lisbon: Bertrand, 1984), pp.279–80. 61 See the text by the curator, Maria Teresa Avila, of Lisbon's Museum of Modern Art (Museu do Chiado) on the museum's website [http://www.museudochiado-ipmuseus.pt/pt/node/224, accessed 4 Oct. 2010]. The museum held an important exhibition of Hein Semke's work in 2005. Also see Semke's only biography, by his wife, Teresa Balté, Hein Semke, a Coragem de ser Rosto (Lisbon: Imprensa Nacional-Casa da Moeda, 2008). 62 This phrase leads me to believe that the painting he was referring to was The Magdalene Anointing the Feet of Christ (Figure 8), a photograph of which was published twenty years ago in the Jesuit magazine Weltweit (Nuremberg: 1981), p.9, but with no indication of where the painting is held. 63 P. Manuel Pires, ‘Ângelo da Fonseca, o Homem, a Obra e a Crítica’, in A Vida, Ano VII (21 & 22 Nov. 1944), pp.2–4. 64 Mitter, The Triumph of Modernism, pp.114–22. 65 Lederle, ‘Christian Artists in India in the Modern Period’, pp.71–80. 66 For the Nazarenes, see M.B. Frank, Romantic Painting Redefined: Nazarene Tradition and the Narratives of Romanticism (London: Ashgate Publishing, 2001); and the catalogue, Religion, Power, Art. The Nazarenes (Frankfurt: Schirn Kunsthalle, 2005). See also Michel Caffort, Les Nazaréens Français. Théorie et Pratique de la peinture Réligieuse au XIXe siècle (Rennes Cedex: Presses Universitaires de Rennes, 2009). For the art of Beuron, see Cordula Grewe, ‘Re-Enchantment as Artistic Practice: Strategies of Emulation in German Romantic Art and Theory’, in New German Critique, Vol.94, special issue, Secularization and Disenchantment (Winter 2005), pp.36–71; and the recent publication of a collection of texts by one of Beuron's theoreticians, Desiderius Lenz, The Aesthetics of Beuron and Other Writings (London: Francis Boutle Publishers, 2009). For these movements in general, see John S. Cornell, ‘What is a Religious Painting?’, in Nineteenth-Century Contexts: An Interdisciplinary Journal, Vol.14, no.2 (1990), pp.115–74. 67 See, among many examples, Guha-Thakurta, The Making of a ‘New’ Indian Art; and the very influential and very perceptive Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), esp. Chap. 1, ‘Whose Imagined Community?’ 68 For the peculiar way in which popular photography is modern in India, see Christopher Pinney, Camera Indica, the Social Life of Indian Photographs (London: Reaktion Books, 1997), esp. Chap. 2. 69 For the monuments, art history and visual culture of India, see Tapati Guha-Thakurta, Monuments, Objects, Histories, Institutions of Art in Colonial and Postcolonial India (New Delhi, Permanent Black, 2004), esp. Chaps 6 & 8. Also see Partha Chatterjee, ‘The Sacred Circulation of National Images’, in Maria Antonia Pelizzari (ed.), Traces of India, Photography, Architecture, and the Politics of Representation, 1850–1900 (New Haven, CT: Canadian Centre for Architecture and Yale Center for British Art, Yale University Press, 2003), pp.276–92. 70 For nation-building in visual culture in Indian film documentaries, see Sirupa Roy, Beyond Belief: India and The Politics of Postcolonial Nationalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007). 71 In my opinion, the best book yet written on Ravi Varma is Erwin Neumeyer and Christine Schelberger (eds), Raja Ravi Varma, Portrait of an Artist. The Diary of C. Raja Raja Varma (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2005). Also see Christopher Pinney, Photos of the Gods. The Printed Image and Political Struggle in India (New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2004), esp. Chap. 4. 72 Pinney, Photos of the Gods, p.61. 73 Guha-Thakurta, ‘Abanindranath, Known and Unknown’, pp.84–103. 74 Gayatri Sinha, ‘The 1930s, a Decade of Modernism’, in Gayatri Sinha (ed.), Art and Visual Culture in India (1857–2007) (Mumbai: Marg Publications, 2009), p.121. Additional informationNotes on contributorsPaulo Varela Gomes Acknowledgements: Two persons were instrumental in the writing and editing of the version of this article submitted to South Asia—Rochelle Pinto and Jason K. Fernandes. I thank them for their invaluable comments, both on content and style. I am also indebted to Dr. Kama Maclean and the anonymous reviewers of South Asia who, apart from making my English easier to read and my facts more precise, drew my attention to a couple of references that had escaped me. Dr. Délio Mendonça SJ, former director of the Xavier Centre of Historical Research (XCHR), Goa, and the Centre's librarian, have put at my disposal the Centre's invaluable resources on Angelo da Fonseca. Dr. Délio Mendonça and Mr. Vivek Menezes have discussed some important aspects of the paper with me and their comments were useful. Unfortunately, the present direction of the Xavier Centre made it impossible for this article to be enriched with good quality images of some of Fonseca's works which are in its possession.