How the Goan Lost his Art - by Vivek Menezes
Cecil Pinto
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“Better had I died,” said Francis Newton Souza about his disfiguring
childhood bout of smallpox. “Would have saved me a lot of trouble. I
would not have had to bear an artist’s tormented soul, create art in a
country that despises her artists and is ignorant of her heritage.”
(Words and Lines, 1957.) This despairing plaint was written when the
artist was still only 33 years old, and already nearly eight years
into an ambitious but hardscrabble exile, in slow transit from London
to Paris and back again.
The bitterness, the anguish was entirely understandable. It had taken
a kind of superhuman determination and grit to merely get to the
cultural capitals of the West -- most of Souza’s savings accrued in
small pots, from dances and concerts organised for idle British army
men. The bravado of the Saligao boy seems outlandish in retrospect,
even in our age of NRI ballyhoo – he was determined to make his place
among the great modern artists of the world, and that was going to be
that.
Everyone but his mother laughed at him. Obviously there was no way
that Newton was going to be a great artist, because great artists do
not come from Saligao, with smallpox marks all over their face. He was
expelled from St Xavier’s School. He was expelled from the J.J. School
of Art. The police threatened his first show (each painting sold for
Rs. 51!) because someone complained about the nudes. It was an
exhausting, constant struggle on the fringes of respectability. He
stood on the threshold in this manner all his life, a tense waiting
game that was resolved only after he was in the grave.
In today’s era of endless hype and soaring auction prices that
routinely top a million dollars, it’s essential to remember that
Souza’s paintings sold for negligible sums of money all through his
long career. And, for a good part of that time, his art was pilloried,
and very often treated as faintly disreputable by the very same
establishment that now gushes triumphantly about “The Masters”.
Souza’s harrowing tale isn’t very unusual at all – the same treatment
has been meted out, with metronomic regularity, to each generation of
Goan artists. The ‘enfant terrible’ was forcibly shunted to the
sidelines; the serene visionary Vasudeo Gaitonde was ignored and
almost wilfully misunderstood. You look at Laxman Pai’s work and see
genuinely superb paintings in one style in one era, and an entirely
different style in another, and you detect how he was harried, driven
to a state of almost schizophrenic, compulsive adaptation.
The urge to fit in, to belong, is the Achilles heel of the Goan
original – the narrative arc of modern Goan art traces a shabby,
ill-fated, desperate struggle for acceptance and recognition on its
own terms. It has never come; the irony in our fate is that we keep
looking for it.
No case is more egregious, or, indeed emblematic, than that of India’s
towering lost modernist, Angelo de Fonseca. Born the youngest of 17
children, to a wealthy land-owning family from the island of Santo
Estevão, he set off to become an artist in the teeth of vociferous
opposition. Even worse, from his family’s perspective, the young
grandee had no interest at all in the one recognized institution, the
J.J. School of Art, where another pioneering Goan artist, Antonio
Xavier Trindade, had become faculty member in 1921.
No, Fonseca found J.J. unsuitable. In his own words “there was still a
European principal. I wanted to become a sisya of the best Indian
artist in the twenties of this century. Accordingly, I went to
Santiniketan.”
An examination of Fonseca’s earliest works from Santiniketan reveals a
profound intelligence already worrying away at the margins of what
would become a brilliantly original style.
There is a strongly fired sense of kinship, evident in stunning,
characterful portraits of ‘Guruji’, Rabindranath Tagore, and his
nephew, Abanindranath. The waves that swept through Santiniketan in
that era each had its impact – Fonseca worked to absorb Mughal
tradition, to take in influences from Japanese and Chinese art. Later,
Nandalal Bose gave the young Goan a valuable grounding in the
traditional Indian use of form and colour. The work from this period
is steeped in ambition: Fonseca was building to something but the
object of desire remained unknown.
Direction came forcefully and all at once. Abanindranth Tagore said,
“Go back, young man, and paint the churches of your land.” And as a
sisya must, Fonseca obeyed and headed straight back to Santo Estevao,
to build his future. It was an ill-fated move, in an era of profound
communal mistrust and colonial paranoia.
You look at the paintings now, and you marvel at tremendous growth and
steadily increasing mastery over medium and materials. But Fonseca was
being hounded at each step at the same time, denounced from his own
parish pulpit for contradicting the imported icons of the Portuguese.
Depict the Madonna as a Goan woman? Paint the labourer class with
dignity, even nobility? The clamour of disapproval became total, and
increasingly hysterical, even as Fonseca clung to his ideals. He
continued creating a stunning oeuvre of very Goan paintings that
stands shoulder-to-shoulder with the most important modern Indian art
– organically from the soil to the point that the colours are
literally mixed with the talismanic, very red earth of his native
land. He was now faced with the same plight that has faced our best
artists in each generation. Stay in Goa in relative peace but toe the
line, or leave in order to develop your own original voice.
Fonseca made the same choice that Souza made after him, that Laxman
Pai was cornered into later in the 20th century, which still weighs on
the mind of the seriously talented artists that our culture continues
to unknowingly throw up.
He left. He sought appreciative company where he could get it (Veer
Savarkar’s rightist clique, foreign priests, the fiery nationalist
clergyman H. O. Mascarenhas), and a grim determination started to
emerge in his works that bears another strong parallel to Souza’s
trajectory.
For the story of Goan art is intertwined with a strong streak of sheer
cussedness, a hang-the-consequences attitude that emerged, perhaps
inevitably, after a thousand slights and cuts.
No matter how great the Goan artist – and they don’t come greater than
Fonseca, Souza and Gaitonde – he has had to make a decision to soldier
on against terrific odds. He tends to find himself foundering, in an
interminable waiting game, always seeking approval and acceptance from
constituencies which never share it willingly.
Fonseca was too Indian for colonial toadies, even for his own family.
Souza was too bold and impatient, too Goan for the Indian cognoscenti.
And Gaitonde was so far ahead of his time that we’re still racing to
come to grips with what might be the most eternal work of any Indian
artist in the 20th century.
In all these cases there is a decisive moment, and then a certain
hunkering down with only posterity in mind. At some separate point in
each man’s troubled life, there came an exactly similar moment of
clarity, a reckoning resolved in the same manner.
You see it in the paintings – Souza, Gaitonde and Fonseca each stopped
fussing about the recognition that was destined to elude them in life.
And then they set off with clenched teeth, to play for very high
stakes indeed. They consciously take on the immortals; they overtly
set themselves against and among the greats.
Immensely moving to witness now on canvas and paper, the contemporary
observer stands humbled and contrite in front of these highly
ambitious masterworks that languished unrecognised for so very long.
In this, also, Fonseca’s case stands out as particularly egregious, if
somewhat redeemed by the single-minded fidelity of his widow, Ivy.
Chased from his homeland, he found the Church set against him even in
post-1947 India. The Catholic newspaper, The Examiner, ran articles
denouncing him as ‘pagan,’ though approval from a small coterie of
churchmen provided some solace before he died largely unrecognized in
1967, just two years after Vatican II and its perhaps temporary
glasnost towards indigenous expression.
Steadfast to the end, jaw firmed by that hard-earned determination, he
stuck to his life’s question: “Why should not the Catholic Church find
herself at home in India, when she is really Catholic, i.e. universal,
Indian in India as she is in Europe?”
Back to the art, which we can perhaps look at with a certain
dispassion born from the passage of time, and the churning of history
in what seems to be our direction. What we have, what the Goans have
produced in the contemporary era in an unbroken line (from Trindade
through Fonseca to Gaitonde, Souza and Pai and on to Antonio e Costa
and Viraj Naik) is monumental even while it remains woefully
misunderstood. The common threads of narrative exist for a
re-assessment, but it has not been attempted until now.
Souza has long been appropriated by one narrative, now popular with
auction houses and brand new galleries in San Francisco and New York.
Gaitonde is mired in yet another, still forcibly separated as if by
glass from his very evident cultural roots. Fonseca, as we have
learned, is still unconscionably abandoned; his paintings ignored even
as vastly inferior contemporaries (like the two-dimensional Jamini
Roy) are shoehorned undeservingly into the limelight.
All along, there is a total, unbending denial of their essence of
being, of their Goanity, of what is referred to lovingly in Konkani as
‘goenkarponn’.
It is a kind of existential threat – deny Souza’s irrepressible
Goanness and you deny the reality of his life and strivings. Deny
Gaitonde his context, and lifelong steel-cabled bond with Souza, and
you forcibly manipulate a cherished Genesis story of modern Indian
art. Deny the very existence of the towering genius of Angelo de
Fonseca, and you deprive an entire culture of self-knowledge and the
fertile soil required to grow anew.
Goa stands bereft and deeply impoverished, we have betrayed our
artists and still fail to understand our spectacular heritage.
Santayana famously predicted that “those who forget history are
condemned to repeat it.” But what do we say about a people that has
forgotten its art, that continues busily forgetting even as
generations pile up on generations, that’s hard at work to forget
young artists even as they work today?
Imagine Bengal without any appreciation of Tagore. Think Spain, but
without Goya. Now look around at Goa, where a full ten out of ten
people on 18th June Road or, indeed, in the Central Library, will be
entirely ignorant about Souza or Gaitonde or Antonio Xavier Trindade.
Perhaps even worse, check the reactions of the Indian cognoscenti if
you so much as use the words “Goan art”. Eyes roll, noses upturn. “Is
there such a thing?” “Souza, yes, but he was from Bombay”. “Gaitonde
isn’t Goan, he wasn’t born there.” “Angelo who?”
It’s the Goan destiny, we all eventually have to turn away from the
world, and look intensely at what we have and what we are, and
appreciate it all on our own terms. No one “gets us” the way we would
like, probably because no one can.
Goa has represented the shimmering horizon, the land just before the
unknown, all through recorded history, and there is an undeniably
fluid quality to our culture, character and art that is hard to
understand from any kind of blinkered perspective.
It comes from a space that has always balanced elegantly between
opposing forces, recognisably Eastern to Westerners, yet with the
opposite also entirely true. The world has never been able to
understand the many-layered Goan identity, and we’ve run from it many
times ourselves. But still the art speaks; still the paintings of our
masters strike home.
Recently, after a struggle, an Angelo de Fonseca oil painting was
rescued from destruction. In its rough-hewn wooden frame, it had lain
in a rubbish heap for several years. There is still grime embedded on
the little canvas. Placed on a wall for the first time in decades, it
glowed incandescent. An even-featured Goan girl, veil drawn modestly
over her head, eyes downturned. She is divinity, village belle, virtue
personified. Hypnotically beautiful on the canvas, there is a secret
embedded – the lovely face is alive with a wonderfully delicate light,
from an unseen candle. “It is more beautiful than the Mona Lisa,” said
the man who saved this masterpiece, spontaneously. Then, more quietly,
“It is our Mona Lisa.”
===========
Nazareth, Peter
I have been clearing out messages from my two e-mails--the semester ended last week and I turned in the grades, and my wife and I have been working on things to do with our house since prior to leaving next month for Ashburn, Virginia (1,000 miles from here) for the first birthday of our youngest grandson, Greyson.
I came cross your message about Francis Newton Souza which I had somehow overlooked, though I think I participated in the discussion that followed. I found it very moving, and it resonated with me in terms of my experience. One can become an artist (in my case, writer and critic) and be recognized by people of various cultures (and I don't mean ego recognition: I mean the aesthetic, philosophical and political creativeness in our work that speaks to people) except Goans. But how can one be an artist if one does not have roots? You reach out to the world from somewhere (or somewheres), not from a balloon that floats all over the world but which never lands.
I could talk about my experiences, but I have just had my required two glasses of red wine (required by my doctor, who says I need them every day, given the history of my family) so I am not in the best position to present any arguments. All I want to say is that I was very moved by what you wrote about the artist.
Best.
Peter Nazareth
________________________________________
From: goa-bo...@googlegroups.com [goa-bo...@googlegroups.com] on behalf of Cecil Pinto [cecil...@gmail.com]
Sent: Monday, March 19, 2012 10:06 PM
To: goa-bo...@googlegroups.com
Subject: [GOABOOKCLUB] How the Goan Lost his Art - by Vivek Menezes
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Nazareth, Peter
Who wrote the piece on Francis Newton Souza?
Peter
________________________________________
From: goa-bo...@googlegroups.com [goa-bo...@googlegroups.com] on behalf of Nazareth, Peter [peter-n...@uiowa.edu]
Sent: Friday, May 25, 2012 8:25 PM
To: goa-bo...@googlegroups.com
Subject: RE: [GOABOOKCLUB] How the Goan Lost his Art - by Vivek Menezes
Frederick FN Noronha * फ्रेड्रिक नोरोन्या * فريدريك نورونيا
it could be confusing for those who didn't know VM's writing style, or
Cecil's posting style :-) FN
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Books from Goa,1556 http://scr.bi/Goa1556Books
Audio recordings (mostly from Goa): http://bit.ly/GoaRecordings
Nazareth, Peter
Thanks.
I had read it late last night while clearing out my messages, and after drinking two glasses of red wine, and I made a mistake. I read it again this morning and it was clear it was Vivek.
Sorry about the mix-up.
I was thinking about a larger point. Thanks to a long colonialism, many Goans had to go abroad to work and to support the family back home. The people at home may have felt they had lost those who had left, but in fact those who left were interacting with the worlds in which they lived in varying ways. As you can see from Ngugi's long piece, of which I placed a few extracts on-line, I was part of Uganda (and of the British system) and became a Ugandan writer without losing the connection with Goa (and therefore India) through family (and Malaysia through family). My first serious works were African. It was Ngugi who told me at Leeds where we were doing postgraduate studies that it was time I began writing about Goans. He wrote to me from Leeds when I was in the Ministry of Finance to remind me and to say I should try writing a novel. Before that, I had written one-act and radio plays. In fact, while I was writing "X" at Leeds for the BBC African Theatre--Shirley Cordeaux of the BBC African Theatre had just produced my "The Hospital" and told me to write another radio--play for her when she came to interview me for a program at Leeds--I discussed it with Ngugi and with other friends (Pio and Elvania Zirimu from Uganda, Ime Ikiddeh from Nigeria). It think Ngugi got the idea of decolonizing the mind from our discussions.
When I began thinking of what became "In a Brown Mantle", I wanted to write about Goans not as a bubble living in an African country but as part of the African scene and offering new perspectives to Africans while having a give and take. How to do it? My answer was to have a narrator who was a Goan born in Africa who was also a politician, confessing his story while in exile in London. The novel was African, East African, Ugandan. At the same time it had something to offer Goans living in Goa. So it was not just money Goans who went overseas brought to Goa. But Goans had to open their minds to recognize the Africanness (in my case) of the writing.
Should I say bluntly, "Give up the old prejudice against Africans as backward people who need guidance"? I have written about Wole Soyinka (Nobel Laureate 1986) and he is the most complex writer philosophically that I have ever read (as well as being a very funny writer). He grows out of a philosophy-religion-worldview that is over two thousand years old and which has seeded cultures in the West (Brazil, Cuba, Haiti, the US). There is a lot Goans can learn from Soyinka (Ngugi too, bearing in mind that he is from a different cultural tradition) but we have to be willing to open our minds and say, "I don't know, but I can learn something, and I have something to offer too."
Best.
Peter
________________________________________
From: goa-bo...@googlegroups.com [goa-bo...@googlegroups.com] on behalf of Frederick FN Noronha * फ्रेड्रिक नोरोन्या * فريدريك نورونيا [frederic...@gmail.com]
Sent: Saturday, May 26, 2012 9:42 AM
To: goa-bo...@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: [GOABOOKCLUB] How the Goan Lost his Art - by Vivek Menezes
vmingoa
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Nazareth, Peter
Dear Vivek,
Your GQ essay is brilliant and moving.
Reminds me of chapter 1 of one of Flight to Canada by Ishmael Reed. The novelist Raven Quickskill is preparing to write the story of Uncle Robin and is thinking of how he can put something in the story--the mummy curse--so it cannot be stolen by anyone without something happening to the thief. Raven believes this happened when Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote the novel Uncle Tom's Cabin: she took it from Joshua Henson's story,The Life of Josiah Henson, Formerly a Slave, which she acknowledged. Raven thinks:
"When I see those two men in The New York Times in a booth in a fancy restaurant --two bulb-faced jaded men, sitting there, rich as Creole Candy, discussing the money they're going to make from the musical version of Uncle Tom's Cabin, and they have those appetizers in front of them and three kinds of wine--when I see that, and when I see their agent in National Era swimming in the ocean with his chow dog, I wonder why won't the spirits go out to Long Island and touch him. Touch him for what he did to Josiah Henson. Touch him like they touched Harriet."
Raven through his writing puts a curse on the thieves. It could be compared to sticking pins into a voodoo doll that has something of the thief.
I realized when I read the last chapter of my novel The General is Up at the Commonwealth Institute in London in June 1992 at a tribute to Andrew Salkey that this chapter was like sticking the pins into a voodoo doll, fingering and punishing all the people who had been responsible for the General and what he had done--sticking pins through the words. And the words had their effect. I won't say how--the Queen said at the end of the year that it had been an annus horribilis--since there is much prejudice against voodoo in the Western Christian world.
Sound to me through your words that what Souza was doing was putting a curse through his cutting and pasting and painting of the fat cats.
Keep on keeping on with your obsessions. They have meaning. There is power in your words.
Best.
Peter
Sent: Saturday, May 26, 2012 10:55 AM
To: goa-bo...@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: [GOABOOKCLUB] How the Goan Lost his Art - by Vivek Menezes
Cecil Pinto
Thanks for your kind words but the piece on Francis Newton Souza was
penned by Vivek Menezes and not by me.
Cheers!
Cecil
=========
Jerry Pinto
Does anyone know where I can get a Bible in Portuguese?
I do not read the language myself but I have a beloved aunt who does and I would like to buy it for her.
Jerry
George Menezes
--
Ricardo Afonso
SENHOR JERRY
WHERE DO YOU LIVE ?
GOOD WISHES TO YOUR DEAR TIA.
RICARDO
--
B MENEZES
If you have someone who will carry it out to Goa (I suppose that's where you are?) I will look for one here in one of Toronto's Portuguese enclaves.
Braz Menezes
Author: Just Matata - Sin, Saints and Settlers
http://www.matatatrilogy.com
Date: Fri, 8 Jun 2012 10:25:13 +0530
Subject: Re: [GOABOOKCLUB] How the Goan Lost his Art - by Vivek Menezes
From: jeroni...@gmail.com
To: goa-bo...@googlegroups.com