"Kehinde Wiley’s Catholic Imaginary" in THE GOAN EVERYDAY (2 October 2016)

Artist Kehinde Wiley’s A New Republic offers a way to think about art and history as reflections on public culture. 

My longest held memory of the brown-cassocked St. Anthony is of that time on a school holiday when my grandmother made me kneel in front of the altar because I had stayed out longer than usual. She had frantically been asking of passers-by if they had seen her errant grandson. Oblivious, I sauntered back home and was promptly dragged to the shrine in her room. “Tell St. Anthony you’re sorry”, she ordered. Later, I would come to realise that the dear old lady, like so many Catholic Goans, held the tonsured Franciscan in such high esteem for the faith she placed in him as the finder of lost things, naughty lads included. A couple of weeks ago in the American city of Richmond, I encountered St. Anthony again at the Virginia Museum of Fine Art exhibition, Kehinde Wiley: A New Republic, and he looked very different from my childhood memory. 

In Wiley’s canvas, “Anthony of Padua” (2013), he is a young Black man with closely cropped hair. He wears an octopus pendant on a chain and is adorned in a military green jacket with patches. One of these decorative circles bears the image of a snarling black panther, a symbol suggestive of the Black Power movement of 1960s’ America. Cradled in the crook of his left arm is a book instead of the Child Jesus. His raised right hand holds a rod in place of the traditional stalk of lilies. In this pose, it is as if the saint is a painter, with palette and brush, taking in his subject. Behind him, flowers swirl, some of them encircling his waist, others set in relief against his teal-coloured trousers. Through it all, no Jesus to behold, the modern-day Anthony looks upon his viewers with an expression of deep composure. Haughtiness, even. His gaze breaks the fourth wall between the dramatic portrait and its spectators, between the exalted and the mundane. 

Reminiscent of the methods of Goan painter Angelo da Fonseca (1902-1967), the American Wiley employs ordinary people as subjects in depicting themes that evoke the Renaissance, French Rococo, and other Western periods of art, as well as European Christian iconography. Where da Fonseca used South Asian models, including his wife Ivy, to render Christian imagery, Wiley’s muses of choice are everyday Black Americans. In both cases, these artists’ works subvert Eurocentric conceptions of the sacred, by challenging implicit assumptions of race and class in the idealisation of the divine. Moreover, their images alter public culture by demonstrating that the faithful come in many hues and from various economic backgrounds, for the icons in their art are just regular folk. If such art is to be taken as political statement, then Wiley’s reverential presentation of Blackness resonates powerfully with the Black Lives Matter movement in today’s United States where serious questions are being asked about the police killings of Black men and women.

Wiley’s St. Anthony is inspired by the representation of the saint in the 1842-1843 stained glass window created by Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres for the Chapelle St. Ferdinand in Porte des Ternes, Paris. Christian imagery appears elsewhere in Wiley’s oeuvre, including in his own stained glass windows, which again characterise young Black men in contemporary garb as saints. At the Virginia exhibition, museum patrons would have walked through a dark chapel-like gallery, where these back-lit windows and other elements of iconography would have been on display. They would then emerge into a brightly lit space where they would witness various canvasses from the artist’s World Stage series, including pieces from his Indian and Sri Lankan collections. 

In Kehinde Wiley – The World Stage: India-Sri Lanka (2011), critic Gayatri Sinha wonders if Wiley’s South Asian works challenge orientalised notions of the region, but concludes that he “instead pushes for a different dimension of recognition”, especially because the artist “takes young men of the street and accord[s] them a heroic cast … [A]ny one of them could be an unemployed youth familiar from the streets of Bombay or Bangalore. Or they could be Goa’s beach boys, car cleaners from the streets of Tamil Nadu, or young advisasis (tribals) serving in the capital’s diplomatic enclave” (pp. 7-8). To say that Sinha lets slip her class and caste biases would be to state the obvious. Indeed, what Sinha fails to acknowledge is the very divide that Wiley seeks to breach in placing paintings of young men of the street, beach boys, car cleaners, and “tribals” in the elite (or is that elitist?) spaces of the art gallery and the museum. In saying that these subjects are recognisable, Sinha implies their objectification by the Indian art patron. This othering is intensified when the critic does not question why Wiley’s subjects must exist outside these exclusive circles, while only the representation of who they are is allowed in so that it may be consumed by those with access to art.

“The European Orientalist discourse is invoked and vivified, but it also becomes the site for fresh enactments” in Wiley’s South Asia paintings, Sinha muses. Even so, it is Sinha herself who relies on an orientalised understanding of what constitutes South Asian culture when she traces a line between Wiley’s Indian scenes of “temples or prayer rooms” and “Hindu painting tradition from the 17^th to the 19^th centuries” (p. 8). Reliant solely on a British postcolonialist purview, this Brahmanical rendition of India not only eschews the Portuguese Indian legacy (except to tellingly minimise it to “Goa’s beach boys”) but also refuses to consider other faith traditions as influences in South Asian art history. 

To this end, even as Sinha sees Wiley’s representations of blackness as being linked to “histories of shared oppression” in the Afro-Asiatic context (p. 6), she is unable to connect the Catholic themes in the Nigerian American artist’s canon to South Asia. Wiley’s “Anthony of Padua” proves useful in this regard. Though St. Anthony died in Padua, Italy in 1231, he was born in Portugal in 1195. Revered around the Catholic world, his legacy took particular shape in the former Portuguese colony of Angola, where the 17^th-18^th century Kongolese prophetess and anti-colonial revolutionary Kimpa Vita claimed to be a medium for his spirit. 

In the novel Skin (2001), based on the Portuguese Afro-Asiatic slave trade, Margaret Mascarenhas transports the enslaved progeny of the real life Kimpa Vita to Goa. The novel’s magical realism manifests, among other things, in the form of the prophetess’ Goan descendants being able to shape-shift into black panthers. That the black panther appears as an emblem on St. Anthony’s jacket in Wiley’s painting is coincidental. However, what is not is how Wiley’s Catholic imaginary transcends space and time, in much the same way as a 12^th-13^th century Portuguese saint shape-shifts into a Black person in African history and in African American art. Here, one figure is not meant to replace the other; rather, what is to be contended with is why one is not as revered as the other. It is through this palette of complexities that Kehinde Wiley envisions a new republic, even as he questions its borders.

From The Goan.

"Ivy-Covered Canvas" - THE GOAN: I'm Not Here (17 October 2015)

When I heard of Ivy Muriel da Fonseca’s demise on 1 September, 2015, it struck me how little I knew of her. The Goan edition of The Times of India delivered notice of her passing with the introductory words that she was the “widow of the late Indian Christian Cultural Renaissance artiste Angelo da Fonseca…” (6 September 2015). The article then goes on to report how the artist “was virtually hounded out of Goa following severe criticism for painting Christian themes with Indian settings,” and most notably “the Virgin Mary with a kunbi sari.” It is only then that we are told of Ivy da Fonseca’s education and professional life as a teacher, before the piece ends just as it had begun by returning to her artist-husband in whom “there has been a renewed interest … with exhibitions both in India and abroad.” While it would be easy to underscore how the article does little to shed light on da Fonseca’s life outside of casting her as the mate of her more famous husband, it is more useful to consider how the obituary is actually quite indicative of the Goan relationship to art.

Writing about the recent record-breaking sales of paintings by Francisco Newton Souza and Vasudeo Gaitonde, an article by Arti Das in The Navhind Times (26 September 2015) notes how it is only external recognition that brings local awareness to art by Goans. And, yet, while tellingly titled “Valued the World Over, Forgotten at Home – Goa’s most Prized Bardezkars”, Das’ piece about the two deceased painters, who are worthy of all the attention they get, leaves out that other still living artist of Bardez, Lisbon, and Maputo, Vamona Ananta Sinai Navelcar. A few months ago, I had the opportunity to meet with Navelcar at his home in Pomburpa. An octogenarian, the painter’s recall of the past is remarkable. I asked him about the details of his life as recorded in Anne Ketteringham’s biography Vamona Navelcar: An Artist of Three Continents (2013), and was told of his times in the geographies alluded to in the book’s title: Asia, Europe, and Africa. “I should have never come back to Goa”, Navelcar confided. “It was my biggest mistake…”

These stinging words stayed with me, and I shared them a few days later with the Aldona artist Conrad Pinto. “He would feel that way”, Pinto mused, alluding to the lack of infrastructure in Goa for art appreciation. This sentiment is echoed by the late journalist Joel D’Souza who, in an important Goa Today article titled “Goans’ Art Grandeur” (December 2012), traces contemporary Goan art history and the unique trajectories of Goan style, only to come to the conclusion that, in Goa, art is “the pleasure of the art lover’s alone” (p. 24). With this, D’Souza points to the lack of institutional support for Goan artists; even so, he also highlights the need for the enjoyment of art to be a community practice that is not solely in the purview of those classes that frequent galleries or have the monetary ability to own art that is displayed in the exclusive confines of their homes. 

And this is precisely where Ivy da Fonseca’s contribution is forgotten.

From my conversations with art historian, painter, and writer Savia Viegas, I learned of da Fonseca’s championing of her husband’s legacy. The one thing that the aforementioned TOI article does get right is that da Fonseca was formidable, “an iron lady” the piece calls her. Art critics note that it was after his wife that Angelo da Fonseca modelled his brown Madonna, to borrow Viegas’ term (Himal Southasian, August 2010), but had it not been for her sheer audacity in reclaiming her husband’s works, many of the canvases that are now available for public viewership in Goa might not have readily been part of the public domain. As much as she was “in” da Fonseca’s canvas – his inspiration – she was also the woman who continued to keep his work in the public eye long after he had passed away. 

The brilliance of da Fonseca’s work lies not just in his depiction of biblical themes in South Asian hues, but in bringing together the sacred with the ordinary in likening the Madonna to his earthly wife. It was because of his plebeian browning of the Madonna’s skin that da Fonseca courted ire. da Fonseca chose to represent his own community in his art, and so it is only fitting that his works be enjoyed in Goa for it is part of our heritage. Ivy da Fonseca’s role in making this happen should aid the recognition that she was not merely muse nor just the artist’s wife, but a purveyor of culture and an individual in her own right.    

From The Goan.