In a first, Goa to view entirety of works of little-celebrated master Fonseca

PANAJI: The Bengal school of modernism, the watercolour wash technique of the Chinese and Japanese artists, the perspective of the Rajput and Mughal art and the realistic bent of the European Renaissance. It was a Goan artist, Angelo da Fonseca, who merged all of these at once and depicted through it Christian themes.
Fonseca is often regarded one of the greatest of Indian modernists of the 20th century. Yet, few Goans have ever been able to view the entirety of Fonseca’s works under a single roof.
Fonseca’s return to Goa at the peak of his artistic brilliance had turned sour, for colonial Goa of the time found it hard to digest non-European depiction in his paintings of Christian figures. As a result, the artist abruptly left for Pune in Maharashtra, where he died in 1967, his works never fully viewed, analysed or appreciated in Goa.
Now, to mark his 120th birth anniversary, prints of all 126 of his known paintings will be up for viewing for the first time in Goa in their actual size.
“Prints of all his 126 paintings will be exhibited in their actual size. The prints have been taken on same material as the original painting. A canvas painting has been printed on canvas, for instance,” said curator Gerard de Cunha.
It is important for Fonseca’s works to be viewed in their entirety in Goa, not only because he was born here on the island of St Estevam in 1902. It is also because his works often remain misunderstood as being limited to Christian themes. The artist, in fact, has several secular-themed paintings to his credit.
The exhibition will be on display from June 10 to July 2 at Clube Harmonia in Margao and later at the Central Library in Panaji from July 9 to August 6.
Fonseca provided the counter-narrative to colonialist impositions, which was that the West was not the only cradle of beauty and artistic creativity, writes Delio Mendonca, former director of the Xavier Centre for Historical Research. Fonseca’s widow Ivy Muriel, before her death in 2015, had transferred the entire collection of the artist’s work to the Centre.
“The great but unfairly overlooked master artist was an essential bridge figure between the Bombay and Bengali schools of Indian modernism, the creator of an astounding native Christian iconography seamlessly blended into both Eastern and Western influences via his own Goan sensibility,” writes Delio Mendonca in his book ‘Fonseca’, to be released at the end of the nearly two-month long exhibition of the artist’s works.
Medonca states that although there has been some return of attention to Fonseca’s works, his paintings have never been widely seen or analysed for their historical importance.
Born to a wealthy landed family, Fonseca was sent to study in Belgaum and later Bombay (now Mumbai) at an early age. He left Goa when he was barely seven or eight years old and as a youth would first join the medicine programme in Bombay, only to abandon it to enroll at the JJ School of Art.
But the heavy bent at JJ School of Art at the time towards European sensibilities did not go down well with Fonseca, who left for Santiniketan to be trained under Rabindranath Tagore, his nephew Abanindranath, and later Nandalal Bose. It is apparently at Abanindranath’s insistence that Fonseca had returned to Goa to present to his homeland the new gained perspectives of art. But the visit did not go as planned.
“The Christian faith belongs neither to the East nor to the West. It is of the whole world…, that is the reason why the Catholic church has never had a style of her own in her churches and her buildings… Why then can the Catholic church not find herself at home in India, since she is really Catholic, Indian in India as she is European in Europe?” Fonseca had written in an essay.