Essay for exhibition at the Centre of Contemporary Art, New Delhi, 1991
PETER DE FRANCIA IS my intellectual mentor and I write for once without fear of sentiment. Not that you need sentimentalize him. He is as it is a legendary figure exactly in the way that the word is meant, part history, part fiction. And he holds it all together in a body that stands as if for the monumental human or perhaps more aptly he stands among the giants in Mediterranian mythology feeling a sense of camaraderie with such extinct species as for example the melancholy minotaur, “this dangerous, touching, disruptive bull-man at the heart of the labyrinth” which Timothy Hyman confirms is Peter’s own, quite conscious, self-mythicization after Picasso. Every one who knows Peter speaks of him in this way, a figure deeply anomalous and equally contemporary in that his imagination belongs to humankind in its millenial dimension. He derives his faith from Marx; and from Brecht. He identifies with Beckmann and with Leger who in fact he resembles. He has written a definitive book on Leger.
It is said that John Berger, Peter’s close friend during the 1950’s and 60’s, took some of the loneliness and grit, some of that sense of the desperate cause of a displaced socialist hero, from Peter’s person and put it into his fictional character, Janos Lavin, in his memorable first novel, A Painter of Our Time. But here is of course the paradox. Neither Berger’s protagonist, nor his possible part-model, Peter de Francia, has ever been quite the painter of our time. Not in the Anglo-American cultural nexus, not in the cold-war art scene, not in an era of crashed avant-garde movements with their perpetual crisis of meaning. That kind of vocabulary, ‘crisis of meaning’, does not abide in the milieu with which Peter has continued to identify as for example Italy after the war, where the neo-Realists (film makers, writers and painters) conduct a grand passion play among the working class survivors. An image that haunts Peter’s work is Anna Magnani shot as she runs behind a truck of captured Partisans in Rosellini's, Rome, Open City.
It may be that neo-Realism is not also of our time – not any more. But it is a deeply generative moment for the questions it poses about the inalienable truth of the subject, or in the way it copes with historical subjectivities. One may argue that neo-Realism recuperates the deepest aesthetic of our times. Indeed this is the formal logic of Peter’s drawings: their anatomical strength, their iconography and legends. The lineaments of resistance in the human body; the shape it takes in the deepest travails of a struggle. But also the sensuosity that is thus marked, making the body more tender, sustaining the life process as it unfolds in narratives that are comic as well as cruel – but not nihilistic. Is there some other unspoken criterion that we may have recourse to, to judge who is an artist of our time?
In his Success and Failure of Picasso Berger suggested (polemically one presumes or too cleverly as Peter might say since he so admires Picasso for his unsurpassed audacities, for his commitment and his so-called ‘failure’ as well) that Picasso’s work would have fared better in the later decades if he had gone away to some far region of the Third World to renew his energies. Peter spurns this kind of determinism. He comes to India not as a penitant white man, thankfully, but to contextualize some real human contacts with friends and students who have awaited him close on twenty years.
To me it feels that a chunk of the European continent has floated across to our shore – incidentally Peter has not flown across the oceans, this is virtually the first time. These are the kinds of anachronisms he lives by even though he is loyal, almost over and beyond actual political realities, to the revolutionary will of the twentieth century. He did in fact plan to sail to India, god knows in some old P&O boat or what, but intercontinental passenger boats must have all but vanished by now, and in any case I can’t think of Peter adrift over the oceans for weeks and months. With his ambling gait and blue workman’s jacket he is like a labouring earth-giant on rough terrain, marking the ground for positions of potential resistance. He fights battles on home ground: the French on the Algerian atrocities; the English on their support of apartheid. And he beckons to the foreigners to challenge the western frontiers, to provoke the disconsolate purity of the white world. One of his favourite poems is Cavafy’s, ‘Waiting for the Barbarians’.
In 1977 he did a series of drawings on Aime Cesaire’s seminal poem, A Return to my Native Land: “And the voice declares that for centuries Europe / has stuffed us with lies and crammed us with plague, / for it is not true that: / the work of man is finished / we have nothing to do in the world / we are parasites of the world / our job is to keep in step with the world. / The work of man is only just beginning. /...”
If you take along with Cesaire another poet that he much admires, Pablo Neruda, you can see how his imagination encompasses the misery and violence, the erotic fulness, and the tragedy in the representation of Europe's ‘other’. This is the other of which Cavafy the Creek speaks in his poem on the fictional barbarians.
This, to my understanding, would have to be the artist of our time one who can bring civilizations face to face. I think of Peter as setting up an entire relay of alternative possibilities including the alternatives within art history itself (where the protagonists are Bosch and Bruegel, Goya and Daumier, Grosz, Beckmann and Leger, Guttuso and Permeke, Matta and Guston). A relay, whereby progressive chronologies are substituted by a kind of permanent, repititious, emergence of the torch-bearing souls: over a period he has done this entire series of drawings on the noble brigand, Prometheus, stealing the flaming torch for the humans.
Among those who pay homage to Peter are people like himself who have tried to turn anthropology inside out, to redeem the other in themselves. There is Basil Davidson (doyen of African studies and author of the collection on Africa by Penguin) and he says in a catalogue, “This is the de Francia of what used to be called, with admiration, commitment but what is at present quite fallen to the yuppiedom of fashion. This is the real world in other words, beyond the coteries of provincialism. Others may recommend him, or because his humour bits, disrecommend him. For me he is one of the rare makers of our times who has told, who tells, the story of our time”.
And there is John Willett (Brecht scholar, author of books on Expressionism and the inter-war period of New Objectivity). In the same retrospective exhibition catalogue of 1987 he says “At all events we shall be seeing magnificent display of drawings such as we have not seen from any other living British painter, and can reasonably compare with anything the present day world has to offer”. And he goes on, “After that we must ensure that they are shown overseas”. Well, a tiny part of his ouevre is at last being shown overseas – by the persistance of his non-British admirers.
It should, however, be said that in the last few years, the early crusade of Berger, the later one of Ron Kitaj and of Timothy Hyman, has succeeded in bringing to focus issues around figuration and narrative of which Peter can be considered one of the father-figures.
Talking of father-figures, Peter is surely one: bearish and benign, interrogator and guru, and I think I should mention by name the trail of his students in India begining with Nasreen Mohamedi in the mid 50’s at St. Martin’s, going on to Gulam Sheikh at the Royal College of Art, in the 1960's, as also myself. Then Shamshad, Ranbir Kaleka, Rekha Rodwittya, Sheela Gowda, in the 1970’s and 80’s, as well as other art students who did not have him as a tutor but who were welcomed by him in the painting department of the R. C. A: Ajai Desai, Tara Sabharwal, B. V. Suresh, and Vasudevan. Perhaps some others. Peter, for his part, knows many other Indian artists in person, and he knows the work of that many more, through exhibitions and publications.
When I was doing my masters' research at R. C. A. under his supervision, I remember how he navigated me across my sea of ignorance. Everytime I submitted some pages of my thesis for his comment he gave me back sheets of notes typed in black and red ink: questions, invectives, conundrums, astounding bibliographies and interspersed with all this, travel itineraries to the great museums and cathedral towns in Europe. On Peter's suggestion I wound my way down to the Burgundy region of France in Spring 1969, travelled to little towns without knowing a word of French and arrived finally, after a short spell of hitch-hiking up the hill at the magical village of Vezelay (where Romain Rolland lived). And my suicidal loneliness was redeemed by the magnificent Romanesque cathedral of La Madeleine with its image of Christ in Majesty sculpted in splendid simplicity. Back in the study he taught me in a hundred different ways that ‘the eye is a part of the mind’, that I must live the metropolitan life of the modern Indian committed nevertheless to a civilizational memory that imperialism, past and present, would have us lose. And the need to give persistant historical attention to the particularities of one's culture at the level of all its semantic complexities and thereby to wrest the historical dimensions of the ‘orient’ for our own real and romantic needs.
Peter gave formal lectures on occasion and one of the best I ever heard him give (besides of course, Leger, on whom Peter has done this long research) was on Paul Klee; not a Marxist apologia but not also mystification with which Klee is so often belied.
This was an entire way of perceiving the ironic connection between language and meaning within a small pictorial field. A way of comprehending that passage in Walter Benjamin's “Thesis on the Philosophy of History” in which he refers to the Klee painting named ‘Angelus Novus’: “.....an angel looking as though he is about to move away from some- thing he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one picture the angel of history. His face is turned towards the past. .....The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistably propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debries before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress”. (Illuminations).
Peter has come to India in the last decade of this century which seems at this historic moment to have been outwitted by its own revolutionary promises. He comes from a changed Europe, but the meaning of the change is still deeply obscure. I think one of the first things Peter will tell me when I meet him soon is precisely what sense he makes of the momentous happening in Europe but I think he will also confirm that whatever happens one must watch the angel of history more intently now than ever before.