Tagore's Advice: The Critical Fortune and Misfortune of the Goan Painter Angelo da Fonseca (1902–1967)

Abstract

This essay argues that the building of Angelo da Fonseca's critical fortune as a Christian artist from the 1930s to the 1950s was simultaneously and necessarily the building of his later misfortune and oblivion as a modern artist. Angelo da Fonseca was characterised as a Catholic painter during the first half of the twentieth century after the advice to ‘paint churches’ purportedly given to him by Rabindranath Tagore (or perhaps his nephew, Abanindranath Tagore). At the time, there was a generalised movement for the creation of a new Christian art involving many artists from all over the world. They too have vanished from art history's printed memory. This was due to modernism's exclusion of Christianity as a subject, which made it impossible for historians and critics to deal with twentieth-century Christian art. This, it will be argued, eventually led to a further exclusion: Indian Christian art was seen as simultaneously un-modern and un-Indian and was, therefore, omitted from the process played by the arts in India's nation-building.