Through the 1950s and 1960s, hotels and restaurants along (what was then called) Bombay’s Churchgate Street Extension (now known as Veer Nariman Road) thrummed with performances by jazz artistes. While echoes of the vibrant, flourishing cultural scene of the avenue are manifest in archives and well-researched publications, not many know of the erstwhile Cruzo Studio, an equally lively place then, located right across the road on the first floor of Stadium House. The space was the atelier of Goan artist Antonio Piedade da Cruz (c. 1895-1982), or Cruzo, as he was usually known.
Born in the town of Velim in the Salcette district of Portuguese-dominated Goa, da Cruz was educated at the Sir Jamsetjee Jejeebhoy School of Art, Bombay, and then went on to study at the Academy of Arts in Berlin —the Akademie der Künste (now the Universität der Künste). He attained the status of a ‘master student’ (Meisterschüler) in Berlin and graduated to showcasing his works — mostly portraits — across Germany and Portugal, as well as Madrid and Paris. While Cruzo was a celebrated salon artist in Europe, his contribution to modern Indian art has been rendered inert, almost lapsing into a stupor after his death in 1982.
Finding Cruzo
It was only in 2013 when Goa-based industrialist Dattaraj Salgaocar chanced upon da Cruz’s works that the artist’s rich opus came to light. A posthumous excavation of the Cruzo Studio revealed the state of disrepair — and despair — in which da Cruz’s works were lying. After being untended for several years, the paintings had fallen prey to depredations of Mumbai’s humid climes and unwarranted attention from pigeons. Currently part of the Salgaocar Collection, they then had to be carefully reinstated by Mumbai-based conservator-restorer Kayan Marshall Pandole.
An exhibition titled The Quest for Cruzo: A Homage to the Art of Antonio Piedade da Cruz —on display at the Sunaparanta: Goa Centre for the Arts — serves as a conduit for making the aforementioned works accessible to the public, and breathes a new lease of life into a prized corpus of paintings otherwise atrophied due to years of neglect. Curated by city-based poet, curator and cultural theorist Ranjit Hoskote, the exhibition resurrects the artist’s forgotten legacy through a posse of 16 paintings along with 21 archival photographs and sketches.
Retracing a trajectory
Caught in a skein of da Cruz’s paintings, many of which did not bear a title or date, Hoskote had to thoroughly peruse several sources over the three years that he researched for the exhibition. “In each case, I had to cross-reference a painting against a description of it, which appeared in a catalogue or brochure, or a review, or the memory of those who had seen it,” he explains. “As I went along, I had to rebuild the chronology of da Cruz’s practice. This was complicated by his habit of reworking paintings, revisiting and reshaping them, sometimes over several decades,” says Hoskote.
Irrespective of whether they bore a title or date, the paintings did possess a wealth of internal evidence related to events, artistic concerns, cultural genealogies, and ideological emphases. Additionally, the artist’s son Ivan da Cruz proved to be of immense help; he willingly shared not only photographs of the artist at work, preparatory sketches, and so forth, but also memories of his father’s studio and praxis.
Furthermore, Hoskote happened to speak with Aban Irani, whose family owns K. Rustom & Co, the iconic ice-cream shop nestled within Stadium House, right below where the studio used to be. “Aban very graciously recreated for me her memories of da Cruz and the Cruzo Studio,” shares Hoskote. Owing to his ongoing preoccupation with the oeuvre of artists of the Goan diaspora, the curator also referred to scholarly texts by J. Clement Vaz, Teresa Albuquerque and Flaviano Dias.
“With da Cruz, it was important for me to hold in play events taking place in the Estado da India, in British India, and in Europe — and to reflect on the effects these might have had on one another, and on the sensibility of a young artist transiting among these situations,” points out Hoskote.
An unacknowledged virtuoso
The ‘research exhibition’, as Hoskote puts it, primarily enumerates da Cruz’s painterly pursuit, laden with taxonomies of character, by putting together the evidence and developing multiple historical contexts within which to frame the artist’s practice. Da Cruz’s jaunts within Europe in the 1920s acquainted him with a series of factions such as the Dada and Surrealist movements; the ‘New Objectivity’ of the German Expressionists; as well as abstractionists including Kandinsky, Klee and Mondrian. It was during this period that political instability, social unrest and economic flux were rife across the continent, thereby compelling da Cruz to assert his identity as a ‘colonial subject’ from India, as Hoskote cites. In the late 1920s, upon his return to India, da Cruz was unfortunately greeted by the tyranny of the Salazar dictatorship in Goa, and hence chose to settle down in Bombay. “The city’s [Bombay’s] cosmopolitanism would have appealed to his taste; he would also have foreseen that opportunities would come his way by reason of his European education and reputation, “writes Hoskote in his curatorial essay.
Portrait artist
While in Bombay, da Cruz soon began to display his bravura skills as a portrait artist. Those who patronised da Cruz were largely industrial magnates, influential heavyweights, and the cognoscenti: Maharaja Hari Singh of Kashmir; Lord Brabourne, the then Governor of Bombay; Bhulabhai Desai; Sir Cowasji Jehangir and Lady Jehangir; and Lord Mountbatten, the last Viceroy of colonial India, among others. The studio became the nerve-centre for discussions and debate, almost a place of congregation for writers, artists and activists. In fact, such was his prominence that the Cricket Club of India requested him to arbitrate the process of acquiring the site of the Brabourne Stadium by approaching Lord Brabourne, whose portrait had been commissioned to him then.
However, away from his dealings with the glamourous and the glitterati, da Cruz’s convictions were deeply anchored in conveying a sense of empathy for his fellow Indian compatriots and supporting the national struggle for Independence from the clutches of colonialism. This ideology thus impelled him to dedicate a series of paintings to Christ and Gandhi, where Christ was approached as ‘a redeemer of the oppressed’ and Gandhi as an embodiment of ‘peace, community and compassion’.
“I am particularly seized by his annotative text to the painting, ‘Temple Entry: Touch the Untouchables (1965)’, in which he issues a forthright denunciation of the caste system and the apartheid it has promoted, and asserts that no truly democratic system could countenance such a pernicious hierarchy,” explains Hoskote. Moreover, the titles da Cruz attributes to his works also articulate his ideological position unambiguously.
Assembling a larger picture
For Hoskote, The Quest for Cruzo is an invitation — or a lexicon — of the artist’s life, work, struggles, and concerns. “I have structured the exhibition in terms of what seem to me to have been his three focal concerns: the mystery of the self, the ministry of Mahatma Gandhi, and the redemptive presence of Christ. Each of these foci —the self, Gandhi, and Christ —has a ‘sanctum’ devoted to it in the layout of the exhibition,” he elaborates. Furthermore, the survey of da Cruz’s work is just a starting point, and its logical terminus would be a full-blown retrospective. “I regard [the exhibition] as an opening gesture in the project of retrieving da Cruz from amnesia and restoring him to his proper place in our understanding of modern Indian art, especially in the Bombay of the period 1930-1990,” says Hoskote, echoing concern.
While his presence may well seem elusory in the history of modern Indian art, the exhibition is a much-needed reminder of the invaluable contribution of da Cruz as a distinguished draughtsman.
The Quest for Cruzo: A Homage to the Art of Antonio Piedade da Cruz is on display at the Sunaparanta: Goa Centre for the Arts, Panaji until July 20.
The author is a Mumbai-based freelance writer
