Vivek Menezes
Even as an unprecedented fiesta of the arts engulfs the torn-up, tormented landscape of Panjim, an extraordinary masterpiece of modern Indian art has emerged almost silently from deep within the Ivy da Fonseca archive of her late husband Angelo’s paintings at the Xavier Centre of Historical Research in Porvorim. What is more, the apocalyptic, unforgettable Son of Man - painted just before the artist’s untimely death - is just one highlight of Savia Viegas’s creditable selection of this visionary modernist’s best work, now on display at the XCHR until February, with brand new ramp and elevator to ensure ease of access. Everyone is recommended to visit, and to set aside enough time for unhurried viewing of these priceless, peerless treasures.
“Fonseca belongs to Goa, and the world,” says Fr. Rinald D’Souza, the Director of XCHR who has undertaken these long-overdue improvements. “For all the western missionary tropes associated with Francis Xavier and other missionaries, popular discourse has hardly focussed on Goans and Indians involved in the making of Christianity. While one is so accustomed to paint Christianity ‘white’, one hardly realises that Christianity in the subcontinent predates its spread in many parts of Europe and the west. Fonseca is an artist, yes; but much more a theologian too. Viewing Fonseca can challenge your perspectives. It takes you to the centre of the debate on the representations of Christianity in India. In a way, you could see Fonseca talking back to Xavier.”
The story of Fonseca over the generations has already taken many dramatic twists since his birth on the Mandovi river island of Santo Estêvão in 1902, into one of the wealthiest families of Goa. Like many children born to privilege in those days, he was sent across to British India for education, eventually finishing school at St. Vincent’s in Poona, and following a well-beaten track to the Grant Medical College in Bombay, where he excelled in anatomical drawing but disliked everything else. Then, he was nudged towards the Sir JJ School of Art – where his countryman Antonio Xavier Trindade was a celebrated member of the faculty – but demurred. Instead, the idealistic young Goan went to Shantiniketan to study with the Tagores and Nandalal Bose, where he became an especially favoured pupil, and headed back home in 1931 to what everyone assumed would be a great future.
Unfortunately, that never happened. Trindade found himself criticised, even shunned, for keeping on painting an indigenous Indian Christian iconography, and he eventually fled Goa in disarray. Right until his death in 1967, he painted in dignified obscurity, while tending the Christa Prema Seva Sangha ashram of the Anglican Church in the Poona outskirts. His works remained mostly unseen except for regular, valiant efforts of his widow, the late educationist Ivy da Fonseca. Around 17 years ago, after a modest revival of interest, this great champion of her husband’s works brought them to the XCHR on the condition they would remain on permanent display, but that promise has not been substantially kept until now. It is very heartening to hear from the institution’s young director that “we recognise that we have a long way to go before Fonseca becomes embedded within our cultural landscape [and] we take it as our responsibility to achieve this.”
Although the works have not been on any systematic display for all these years, the good news is that interest kept on building, and Fonseca is now beginning to be understood as one of the essential modernists. Happily, while Ivy was still alive, her husband’s paintings started being written about in cover stories in India’s leading art magazines, and a further leap occurred in 2022, with a landmark monograph by the Jesuit scholar-academic Delio de Mendonça and – most important of all – a long entry about the artist in the mammoth, self-consciously canonical 20th Century Indian Art, edited by Partha Mitter, Dave Mukherji and Rakhee Balaram for Thames & Hudson.
The author of the Thames & Hudson entry is Rupert Arrowsmith, the London-based art historian and Oxford Univerdsity Press author who was amongst the first scholars to celebrate Fonseca’s re-emergence in the 21st century. Earlier this week, I sent him an image of Son of Man, and he quickly emailed back: “This is a strikingly assertive work that seems of a piece with the Apocalypse and the Morning Star of the same year [which was] fraught with apocalyptic events such as the wild escalation of the war in Vietnam, and, in the Holy Land, the events leading up to the Six Day War. Religious tensions were on Fonseca's mind, and he wrote in his notes at one point, 'When bhakti is dead, India, from being the home of the world’s religions, will become the storm-centre of the East.' And yet, as in the other two known paintings of what we might begin to call 'the Apocalypse series', there are also rays of hope. It must be relevant, for example, that the injunction of the Son of Man to the prophet of Revelation is not 'Fear me,' but 'Fear not' (1:17, KJV). I think that for Fonseca, bhakti, universal love, in the end superseded all else, that even at the down-going, at the zenith of destruction, it would be seen rising again, like the morning star. And so we have the Son of Man as Shiva Nataraja - the omega that implies a returning alpha, the end that implies a new beginning in the endless and necessary cosmic cycle of creation and destruction.”
Arrowsmith says that “Fonseca's approach both to subject-matter and to painterly technique had been developing in subtle ways throughout the 1960's, but the vigour and urgency of the Apocalypse series does burst unexpectedly onto the scene, and I agree that these paintings can be seen as a watershed in terms of Fonseca's powers as a creator. Certainly, when he succumbed to meningitis, he took a lot of paintings with him; I think that if he had lived as long as M. F. Husain, for example, we would have seen some astonishing things.”
The main issue is context, says Arrowsmith: “the problem for Fonseca vis a vis the canon of Indian Modernism is that he has, until very recently, been sidelined as 'a Christian painter' with European inspirational leanings. To do this is to ignore the essentially transcultural impetus of his work, the eclectic use in it of tropes and iconography drawn especially from the Hindu-Buddhist religious tradition, and his stylistic references not only to historical Western painting, but also to East Asian developments, especially to that of early twentieth-century Japanese art, to which he was exposed at Santiniketan and which was also an indisputable influence on the work of Abanindranath Tagore and others. But in art history, outsiders always have their day, and surely it is exactly Fonseca's pluralism, his insistence on the universal beneath the specific that in today's fractious times make him more interesting than ever, not only to an Indian audience, but to a global one.”