Christmas 2017: From FN Souza to Jamini Roy, artists who profiled Christ

FN Souza

Some credit FN Souza's mangled Christs as his rebellion against inherited theology, overt religiosity and money floundering ecclesiastics. Others, like the culture theorist, curator and poet Ranjit Hoskote, feel that Souza "captures the actual agony of Christ and strips the centuries of aestheticising this figure in art down to raw flesh, bones and thorns." In the Supper at Emmaus (1987) painting, Souza's Christ stares at the viewer through empty sockets.

While, in the Last Howl from the Cross (1963), Christ is shown shrieking in pain, his protruding teeth matching the porcupine crown of thorns. Curator Farah Siddiqui loves Souza's Christs. "His human form is very inventive, whether it's his Christ, his Pope or his women... there's a lot of visible angst in his work." About his Christs, Siddiqui says, "Souza took the native art of Goa and his stance on the Church and its grand depiction in Europe, and mixed all that up into a very powerful, and sometimes disturbing imagery."

Krishen Khanna

It is said that the 92-year-old Padma Bhushan recipient forayed into the world of art after his father gave him an image of the Last Supper to copy at the age of seven. One his many attempts at the subject, that prominently shows the face of Christ is a top-view of an empty table with Jesus at the centre, in glowing robes and hands which cup at thin air, while his disciplines huddle around, dressed in frugal garb – a complete contrast to the more popular Da Vinci. Krishen's Christs are without a halo and appear morose. A few examples include: The Betrayal (2006) where his Disciple Judas gives away Jesus' identity with a hug and kiss while Christ appears resigned to his fate, aware that the gesture reeks of unfaithfulness. Khanna's pencil profile of Christ in A Crown of Thorns (1970) is redolent of Panama's Cristo Negro and Black Christ imagery with its racial undertones; his facial features barely pronounced. His Doubting Thomas and Jesus (1978) is especially unique for its portrayal of a 'brown' Christ who partly disrobes himselfto his disciple to expose the cruxification wounds.

Akbar Padamsee

Padamsee's obsession of painting portraits, which he calls 'heads', is well-known. A case in point: about 110 of his 'heads' were recently on display at Worli's Priyashi Art Gallery. Among these was a charcoal-on-lithograph head of Christ, a subject the 89-year-old artist keeps coming back to in his long, painterly career. "I just love the face of Christ," was the only explanation the wheelchair-bound Padamasee, who also faces a difficulty in speech, offered at his show. However, Hoskote elaborates, "What you see in his Christs is resilience and the promise of resurrection. You can see his strong lineage of going back to the Renaissance and European painting."

Anjolie Ela Menon

A black crown of slim, triangular thorns over a bloodied hairline is the easiest way to identify an Anjolie Ela Menon Christ. Hoskote notes that Menon's portraits were an after-product of her days as a student in Paris. "Here I was influenced by early Christian Art and Byzantine paintings," recalls Menon. "Years later, while in Russia, I was mesmerised by the wonderful icons in churches there and painted many images of Christ," she says, hinting at the gold leaf painting tradition of Russia, where she later lived in the 1960s. The Tanjore school, and the Romanesque and Gothic styles are supposedly peripheral influences. In the portraits here, Menon's Christs are bathed in browns with gold highlights to strip away the glory from the white and blue-eyed Jesus' of the West.

Madhvi Parekh

Parekh's Christs reflects her modern art learnings gleaned from husband Manu and the folklore she witnessed during her growing years at a village in Gujarat. Her father, a Gandhian school teacher, instilled in her that all gods are one. For this reason, the artist continues to visit all holy precincts with equal piety. It was a trip to Jerusalem that influenced the artist to paint on Christ, who until then had painted gods Durga, Kali and Ganesha. "While I enjoyed the Christian iconography at the many churches in Jerusalem with Manu, I was unnerved by the light-and-sound show at the Citadel and portrayal of Jew massacres at the Holocaust Museum. I can still hear the cries of the children in my ears... I'm also impacted by the unique life of Christ, who was born in stable and died for his people." She surrounds her Christs in typical, hieroglyphic imagery of crosses, saints, churches, chalices, angels with folk-ish sun and stars. "Madhvi might not even agree with this, but I would read her as approaching this subject and tradition through Jamini Roy," observes Hoskote. "The way in which Roy absorbs and assimilates the subject through his particular vocabulary is modernist, but all founded on the patachitra. Madhvi's own idiom has something in common with folk art and child art, but is not naive in any way."

Jamini Roy

Roy, an important artist of the modern era, painted on an array of themes – rural Bengal, mythology, festivals and customs, everyday life of India, in a style he drew from the Kalighat Pat tradition of painting. He recorded various episodes in Christ’s life, such as Madonna and Child, Last Supper, crucifixion and many narrative-less portraits as the one represented here. This Christ by Roy done in fluent, bold outlines, a quirky scalloped beard, slim chin puff and loose strands that frame his face on either side, appears elongated and slightly hipsterish. Those almond eyes – slivers of off-white along with the dual halo and pattern on the garment, in a painting done largely in browns –  arrests your attention with their alert gaze.