http://epaper.heraldgoa.in/fullview.php?edn=oHeraldo&artid=OHERALDO_GOA_20220625_9_6
120 years after he was born on the serenely beautiful Mandovi river island of Santo Estêvão, the supremely talented modernist painter Angelo da Fonseca is finally edging into the global pantheon of immortals where he always belonged, even if historical vicissitudes barred it from happening during his own lifetime and several decades afterwards. That unjust drought of attention and acclaim seems to be coming to an end in 2022, with an entry in the new, self-consciously canonical *20th Century Indian Art*, edited by Partha Mitter, Dave Mukherji and Rakhee Balaram for Thames & Hudson. More significantly, there’s another landmark volume on its way right here in Goa, by the Jesuit scholar-academic Delio de Mendonça, which contains 126 reproductions that will finally place this incredible, irresistible oeuvre in the hands of countless more people than have ever seen them before. Mendonça is my friend and close collaborator, and I have contributed the foreword to his book, which is being published by Gerard da Cunha for Architecture Autonomous (see this: angelofonseca.com). Together, we have shared many aspects of the unlikely journey that began in 2006 - four decades posthumously for Fonseca - after the artist’s indomitable widow Ivy gathered up her husband’s archive of surviving works, which she had defended ferociously in their home city of Pune, and entrusted it to the Xavier Centre of Historical Research in Porvorim, with the understanding that the institution would safeguard, study, showcase and celebrate this priceless treasure. It didn’t happen quite that way, but it is to Mendonça’s immense credit that he never wavered, kept persevering even after being transferred to the faculty of the Gregorian University in Rome, and stayed the course to keep his promise to the greatest extent he could manage. That utmost sincerity shows, because Fonseca is an impressive achievement, and an essential corrective to the tedious, tendentious historical narratives which are being constantly regurgitated in India today. Thus, it was wonderfully moving and apt to hear Archbishop Filipe Neri Ferrão – who will be elevated to the cardinalate by Pope Francis in August as the first-ever archbishop of Goa to be so honoured in nearly five centuries – warmly embrace and endorse Angelo da Fonseca’s work (at the new book’s “soft launch” in Margao earlier this month) in a robust framework of understanding that has been sorely lacking in previous generations of prelates. He acknowledged with great sensitivity that “such people have the courage to face opposition from their contemporaries and to row against the tide, knowing that they carry within them a seed that promises to grow into an exotic tree of rare beauty which only future generations, and not their own, will know to appreciate.” Being unknown is one thing, that is quite different from being pilloried and purged by your own family and community, which is how Fonseca felt about Goa and Goans, which wound up ending up alienating him from his beloved homeland for the duration of his entire artistic career (which ended prematurely after he succumbed to meningitis in 1967, just as he was reaching the height of his prodigious capabilities). As the artist recounted with considerable hurt roughly 20 years after the first time his paintings were met with hostility: “being the first in this line naturally brought much opposition and criticism from various quarters, constructive very slightly, but mostly destructive.” To be sure, that is the inherent story of modern art. According to one of its most elegant chroniclers, the late German-American academic and author Peter Gay, there are two “defining attributes” to characterize all modernists. “First, the lure of heresy that impelled their actions as they confronted conventional sensibilities; and, second, a commitment to a principled self-scrutiny.” Both these capacities would ideally be awakened and actualized in a cultural climate that calls out – in Ezra Pound’s famous imperative – to “make it new!” All that did happen in the life of Angelo da Fonseca in the early decades of the 20th century. This idealistic scion of one of the biggest landowning Goan families of the time was sent to British India to be educated, first at St. Paul’s in Belgaum, then St. Vincent’s in Poona, following which he caromed from Grant Medical College (from which he dropped out, despite scoring distinction in Anatomy) to the Sir JJ School of Art (where he also dropped out). All this was still, so to speak, “in his lane” as many other students from the Estado da India – including his own family – attended all these institutions. But now came an unexpected turn to the unknown, when Fonseca decided he was done with studying art from westerners, and instead went off to Shantinketan to study with Rabanindranath and Abanindranath Tagore, because “I wanted to be a *shishya* of the best Indian artists of the time.” There is a poignant 1931 drawing reproduced in Mendonça’s book, of Abandindranth, who has inscribed an exhortation to his prized Goan student: “You have now mastered the password in art. Go forth and seek your treasure.” It was an auspicious beginning, but instead of going in the anticipated direction, Fonseca’s return to Goa was turbulent and unhappy, as his passionate, profoundly harmonious Indian Christian iconography was criticized for veering away from familiar colonial imagery. The artist left home in dismay, and spend the rest of his life in monastic obscurity in Poona, where he (even after marriage to Ivy, and the birth of his daughter Yessonda) looked after the the Christa Prema Seva Sangha residential ashram premises, often joined by his close friend and countryman B. B (Bakibab) Borkar. This is a hugely significant story, with many unresolved implications. As Delio de Mendonça asks, with great power and feeling, “How long will Goans who claim a modernist, global and discerning sensitivity, continue to forget Fonseca, an artist they ought to be justly proud of? It is also a matter of growing concern that Goans continue to ignore and permanently lose masterpieces and treasures of their composite heritage. It is a loss for Goa and the whole human family if Fonseca’s legacy continues to remain locked in a chest. Fonseca’s artistic genius does not reside only in his presentation of novel material or a new medium, but in inviting us to delve deeper into ourselves, our culture, belief-traditions and rights, into what we truly are, and can become.”