Mumbaicha Mario (Mumbai Mirror, 26/4/26)

[V M]

https://mumbaimirror.indiatimes.com/others/sunday-read/mumbaicha-mario/articleshow/130519134.html

Next weekend on 2nd May is the 100th birthday of Mario de Miranda, the
iconic artist and illustrator whose vibrant, whimsical oeuvre remains
deeply beloved and highly influential even 15 years after his death in
2011.

Miranda’s merchandising sales have kept growing via multiple Mario
Gallery outlets selling hundreds of products in several Goa locations,
but an uncomfortable paradox nonetheless plagues his artistic legacy.
The work is world-famous, but the artist is regularly sidelined and
dismissed as a “cartoonist.” That injustice always rankled greatly,
but now, just in time for his centenary, an extraordinary treasure
trove of his original artworks has emerged to correct the record. 100
of them will go on display from 8th May at Sunaparanta in Panjim, with
another iteration intended for Mumbai later in the year. Here is Mario
Modern, very different from Postcard Goa, and these works demand an
urgent historical reassessment. They are an immensely moving and
impressive testimony to how hard this ambitious young Indian artist
worked from the 1950’s onwards, growing in mastery and confidence
alongside Bombay morphing into megacity Mumbai.

“Mario's legacy has sadly been reduced to cheap quality grotesque
prints where the colours are changed, and made completely garish to
appeal to trinket-seeking tourists,” says Shaun Lobo, who built this
stunning corpus from works first acquired by his late father Ronnie, a
close friend of the artist. He wants to showcase “all the styles Mario
had, and his role in documenting Indian aspirations from the
1960's-1980's.”

Lobo says “my earliest works in this archive are from Paris when Mario
was on his Gulbenkien Scholarship in Europe. The collection is a
reflection of his career. Other early works are from the Illustrated
Weekly of India and journals like Filmfare in the 1960's and 1970's.
Some are from the iconic Sketchbook about life in Bombay, depicting
the very different lives led by elites and the common man. Then, from
the 1980's, he reinvented himself as book illustrator and muralist. I
have some of his works from this era, and several others that were
done abroad in countries like America, Israel, and Germany.

Several of these images are already relatively well-known in popular
reproduction, including the wonderfully original Mumbai map experiment
that accompanies this column. However, the originals are another thing
altogether, revealing a great deal more about the artist and his
times, and their impact on our own contemporary imagination.

In an acute 2008 assessment of Mario’s importance, Ranjit Hoskote said
this work is “central to the development of postcolonial Bombay’s
sense of itself as a multiethnic and multilingual metropolis in which
local and cosmopolitan impulses play out an intricate dance of
antagonism, mimicry and collusion. As in the Bombay-centric poems of
his somewhat older contemporary Nissim Ezekiel, there is space for the
global traveller and the supercilious secretary in Mario’s art, but
there is also room for the wry pavement-dweller and the industrious
dabbawallah. Mario’s Bombay is capacious and kaleidoscopic, an epic
that dismantles the divides of class and ethnicity. And in this, it
reflects the imagination of an artist who has made himself at home in
diverse milieux, regions and periods.”

Hoskote said “despite having attained iconic status as a chronicler of
Bombay, Mario has not received the homage that is due to him as an
artist. It would be worth exploring the reasons for this negligence of
the fullness of his activity as an image-maker. In the course of a
public career that spans 56 years, Mario has articulated himself
largely through editorial art, an idiom that the conventional
hierarchy of art-making ranks below the so-called fine arts. Editorial
artists are regarded with some dismissiveness as being narrowly
purpose-driven; it is believed that they are tainted by having their
work embedded, as lightweight relief, within a popular medium with its
compulsions towards entertainment and advertisement. Taxonomy is a
terrible thing. Once people have slotted you under a certain label, it
becomes very difficult to persuade them to see you through another
prism. This is remarkably unfortunate, for it does great injustice to
an artist like Mario Miranda, whose art has assumed many forms and
unfolded in various contexts of meaning.”