Angela Trindade

Adding to the Archive

Fundacao Oriente, located in the traditional neighbourhood in Panjim, is home to the Trindade collection since 2012. The paintings include works by Antonio Xavier de Trindade and his daughter Angela.  Fundacao Oriente commissioned the historian Fatima de Silva Gracias, who has a doctorate in Indo-Portuguese history, to write monographs on the artists.  Fatima delivered scholarly work in the following books: ‘Faces of Colonial India - The work of Goan Artist Antonio Xavier de Trindade’ (2014) and ‘Angela Trindade –A Trinity of Light, Colour and Emotion’ (2016).  In this article, we take a peek at Fatima’s monograph on Angela Trindade, one of the pioneering women artists of modern art in India.

The writing familiarizes the reader with Angela’s life and works in India and the US.  Beginning from her childhood (born 1909 in Mumbai), Fatima chronicles the influences of her renowned father, the cultural milieu of Bombay and her Goan roots into her making of an artist. Deftly folding the locales of Mumbai, Fatima paints a vibrant picture of the first half of 20^th century India. When Angela came of age, after graduating from Sir JJ School of Arts, she stepped into a vibrant environment of the first flowerings of the enculturation movement (i.e. the adaptation of Christian liturgy to a non-Christian cultural background).

Fatima’s chapter on Sir JJ School of Art spectacularly delineates the hallowed history of the establishment. From its conception, there have been a number of variations in its curriculum under different directors and Fatima gives the reader enlightening information towards the working of the institution. It’s interesting to gauge the rising trends in Indianisation of the arts with a landmark change during 1920s, when William Eewart Gladstone Solomon took over as principal and stepped up the work started by Lockwood Kipling and John Griffiths  towards Indian motifs and folk elements in art.

Angela’s creditable performance in Sir JJ School of Arts (where her father had been a teacher/artist for two decades) led her to earn fellowships. She soon started experimenting with Indian folk art - a direct contradiction to her base in Western portraiture that she had inherited from her father (who’s famousl y known as ‘Rembrandt of the East’). Fatima writes, “Angela was one of the pioneers of Indian art with Christian religious themes. She became part of the group of artists who worked towards the Indianisation of the Christ story. As forerunners of the movement, the group encountered severe criticism.”

The author traces Angela’s journey from JJ to US where she, successfully painted portraits of national icons including  Gandhi, Tagore and Nehru in India and President Kennedy and President Ford in the US. Beyond portraiture, she became renowned for her evocative works of the Madonna and Christian themes in Indian style. The flat surface of the Indian style painting imbued her work with greater simplicity and emotion. A critical commentary by the author states, “Angela used warm earthy colours and portrayed Mary as a dusky, almond-eyed Indian adorning a colourful sari in various Indian settings. At times, Baby Jesus is shown in a dhoti, like Krishna. Diyas, charpoys, motifs from Ajanta paintings, mudras and lotus flowers replace western representations. Jesus is colorfully depicted in flowing, saffron robes along with his disciples.”

“On migrating to US, where she discovered that her Indianized themes were not appreciated, Angela turned her attention to Tantric art and Abstract Expressionism. Only in abstraction could she finally marry the Eastern and Western influences in her art”, writes Fatima. Abstract Expressionism, a major art movement in 40s New York School (practiced by the famous Dutch born artist Willem de Kooning and Jackson Pollock) inspired her greatly. She began expressing herself exclusively in form and color: an eternal striving for inner growth and spirituality parlayed into Tantric symbolism. Finally, she scaled a peak when she evolved her own idiom of ‘Trinidadism’ Triangle of Tantra and the Christian symbol of Trinity coalesced into the symbol of a triangle, which she then used to depict gods and humans alike. Fatima follows her trajectory through ‘life in triangles.’

The author further extends the scope of her book to include the lives of Angela’s contemporaries and the cultural ferment of the era. The Progressive Artists Group (PAG), which included modern artists such as  MF Hussain, VS Gaitonde, Angelo de Fonseca, Ram Kumar and SH Raza finds a mention in her writing. It is interesting to learn how they interacted and exchanged ideas - taking cues from Western art while creating their own language to etch their canvases. Amrita Sher-Gil, one of the nine jewels of India, and well known for her paintings ‘Hill Women’ and ‘Group of Three Girls’ inspired Angela to paint women depicting sisterhood, an element  quite overlooked in Indian paintings.        

The author recounts her own journey into Angela’s world through the artist’s notepads, letters, newspaper stories and inputs from her close family. Angela’s nephews and nieces living in different parts of the world became an extended family in the process of making of the books and lent a depth of knowledge about her personal life. It is remarkable to note that she was an expert in diverse fields of carpentry, upholstery, sewing, cooking and music. The restoration work that she did on her father’s works is praiseworthy. A warm-spirited person, she was very affectionate and bonded with her siblings and their families, leaving behind stories of love and happiness.

Through the prism of research and interactions, the book paints a vibrant picture of the artistic-cultural ethos of India, more so of Bombay from the last century. The language is lucid and except for duplication of information at certain points, the delivery is cogent and systematic.

Besides the biography of Angela, an interested reader has lots to engage with historically in the book. The paintings along with descriptive text become an art masterclass further extending the boundaries of the monograph.

Antonio Piedade da Cruz's art

http://epaper.navhindtimes.in/NewsDetail.aspx?storyid=10065&date=2016-07-24&pageid=1

Cruzo’s Homecoming!         

Giorgio Vasari was an Italian painter, writer and historian of Renaissance and is most famous for his treatise ‘Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors and Architects.’ Often called "the first art historian”, Vasari compiled artistic biographies, immortalizing works and lives of artists of his era. By this argument, Ranjit Hoskote, the cultural theorist, art critic, curator and poet has become the ‘Vasari’ of contemporary times. Through his writings and meditations, which range between poems, essays, monographs and biographies, he has chronicled the works and lives of many artists. His latest curatorial work on the twentieth century Goan artist Antonio Piedade de Cruz is on display at Sunaparanta, The Goa Centre for Arts.

In retrospect, Hoskote writes that during his student days’ in the 1980s, he had often sighted Cruzo’s studio marked with red metal letters on the first floor of Stadium House on Bombay’s Churchgate Street. After Cruzo passed away, the studio had fallen into obscurity with time, given India’s negligence towards its art and heritage. Sixteen paintings, which are now on display in their magnificence, had been relegated to oblivion, shut in the abandoned dark studio in Bombay’s humid weather conditions. Dataraj Salgoankar chanced upon them in the old studio and realized the treasure he had found. He commissioned the restorer Kayan Marshall Pandole to resurrect the paintings and called upon Hoskote to research and curate the exhibition. Thus began the ‘Quest for Cruzo.’

During the opening of the exhibition at Sunaparanta this month, Hoskote dwelled upon the importance of Cruzo’s art in the history of Indian art history. Cruzo spanned a tumultuous and eventful era in Indian and European cultural milieux in the twentieth century. Born in Verlim, Goa, Cruzo studied at the J.J.School of Art, Mumbai and further went to Germany to study painting at the Academy of Arts in Berlin – the Akademie der Künste. His influences included Dhurandhar, a renowned faculty at JJ, known for his mythological and historical subjects. In Germany, he was under the tutelage of history painter Arthur von Kampf, the nationalist artist Ferdinand Spiegel, and the church painter and poster artist Paul Plontke. Dusseldorf school of painting, dramatic poster art and Christian art against the backdrop of First World War and build-up of nationalistic fascist regimes must have left an imprint on his persona. His loud claim to be identified as an Indian colonial subject rather than a Portuguese national (Portugal had granted citizenship to Goans) during his exhibition at Lisbon speaks of his rootedness and belongingness to his native soil.

Hoskote has streamlined the curatorial construct of Cruzo’s works into three sanctums. At the beginning is the ‘Sanctum of the Self.’ In this curatorial walk at the exhibition, he defined portraitist art of a painter as a search for self. In the journey of self-exploration, an artist finds himself in his portrayal of the other. In his times, Cruzo was in great demand for portraits by the Indian elite, expatriates and the British administrators. Life-like paintings of his clientele boast of Cruzo’s patronage and popularity within prestigious circles of colonized India. Amidst these, his two self-portraits acquire a significance of their own. With a brush and palette in hand, he is flanked by a nurse on one side and a lively skeleton with a violin on the other. About this piece, Hoskote writes in his catalogue essay, “Da Cruz tunes the convergence of art, intellect and medicine to a hallucinatory intensity. The rival claimants exerting their hold on the artist suspend us in a paradox. Is the nurse life or Love or inspiration or Stasis? Is the skeleton Death, or Art? Does sanity ossify, or is art fatal? ” He says that the painting mystifies and does not leave us a simple Manichean choice between clear opposites (black or white/good or evil)

The other two sanctums, of the Mahatma and of Christ, though presented in linearity for easy comprehension at the exhibition, are a reflection of Cruzo’s internal strife. He may have reveled profitably in his portraitist art but his core resonated to the beat of a different drummer. Torn apart by the misery and anguish of India’s anti-colonial struggle, the Bengal famine, the Partition, the exigencies of poverty and hierarchy of caste system, his artwork conveys his complex inner miasma of despair. There is no denying the anguish and agony largely writ through the expressionist lingo of his art form.

The unquestionably arresting and dystopic tableaux ‘You Crucified Me Again’ and ‘Mother India’ intertwine realism with allegory. In the former, the crucifixion is projected on a backdrop of modern warfare (painted during the Vietnam War and the continuing Cold War) portraying bombed multi-storeyed buildings, marching soldiers and battle tanks. The atmosphere is painted with rough dark brush-strokes complementing the subject, incorporating the Danube school of painting, says Hoskote. Mother India, evoking the striking poster art of Paul Plonke, is a dramatic, defiant figure open to any challenge, for she has seen the ultimate – fratricidal war in which a Hindu brother has fatally crossed with his Muslim kin.

These allegorical works through symbolism and allusions also direct the viewer’s attention to the recurring motif of a redeemer in his paintings - Christ, Buddha or the Mahatma. Whereas Buddha is merely alluded to through pictorial tropes, the life-like figures of Gandhi and Christ surrounded by people merge to invoke the liberation theology of the oppressed - God is after all on their side. 

Hoskote also alludes to the Mexican votive in these works, which represent a narrative of a personal story of miracle or favor received rather than static images of saints. Hoskote opines that the Christ iconography of Cruzo can be contemplated in tandem with the Indianized Christian art studies of Angelo da Fonseca and the biblical art of FN Souza.

The Quest for Cruzo’ has just begun, and will keep gathering substratum with Hoskote’s ceaseless strivings on the path to fortify a cultural legacy of our times. Maya Angelo believed in leaving gaps and holes in her prose, such that a reader could enter and actively engage with it, and in the process of participation complete it. Vocalizing a similar thought, Hoskote says that Cruzo’s creative art too can be interpreted in myriad ways. Finally it’s the engagement which matters!