Aubrey Collette

Across a Colombo breakfast table in the 1950s a politician found himself reduced to a few merciless lines, his vanity and his manner caught more exactly in a newspaper cartoon than any photograph could have managed, and the hand that had done it belonged to a founding member of the island’s first modern art movement. Aubrey Collette had an eye for character, and it made him first a painter and then, more dangerously, a satirist.

He was born on 5 September 1920, the son of a photographer. He learned to draw in the Colombo class of David Paynter, the academically trained painter newly back from the Royal Academy schools in London, and there he worked alongside Ivan Peries, another who would help make the modern movement; when the art-mastership at Royal College fell vacant the two of them applied, and Collette was the one appointed. When the ’43 Group was founded in 1943 Collette was among its founding members, a younger voice in a circle that had set itself against Victorian naturalism and the colonial academy. Drawing was his own first love, and Ivan Peries brought him to painting; Collette in turn painted the movement’s group portrait, the ’43 Fresco now at the Sapumal Foundation, which sets the founders together in one frame, and later a Reminiscence Fresco.

Painting, though, was not where his gift for the human face would do its sharpest work. Ivan Peries once gave him a canvas-bound sketchbook, which he filled inside a fortnight with caricatures Peries rated above David Low’s. He taught art at Royal College around 1946, his classes there producing painters of their own, among them Gamini Warnasuriya and Ranjit Fernando, and through those years he was drawing political cartoons for the Times of Ceylon, the Ceylon Observer and, as ‘Spur’, for the Daily News, reading the politics of a newly independent country and rendering its figures with a caricaturist’s precision. His Ceylon readers knew his creation Citizen Perera, the hapless everyman buffeted by politics, politicians and an unfriendly providence. His pen turned to the language politics and the communal currents of the 1950s, and it did not flatter. An early collection, Ceylon Since Soulbury, drew together the cartoons of the immediate post-war years, and in 1954 he assembled seventy-three of his pastel caricatures as 1954 Faces. The Soulbury of the title was the British commission that toured the island in 1944 and 1945 and drew up the constitution under which Ceylon won internal self-government and then, on 4 February 1948, independence.

The precision had a cost. By 1961 the hostility his cartoons provoked had risen far enough to drive him from Ceylon, first to England and then to Australia, where he lived out the rest of his life. Exile did not still the pen. He drew for The Bulletin and then joined The Australian as an editorial cartoonist, worked later for the Melbourne Herald, and kept his connections with the Asian press; his comic strip ‘Sun Tan’ ran to an Asian readership. In 1970 he was awarded the Walkley Award, the Australian press’s own recognition of his craft.

He died in Melbourne on 8 January 1992. The record of him now runs on two tracks that were always one gift: the ’43 Group painter and the newspaper satirist, both grounded in the same unusual capacity to find a person’s essence and set it down in a few lines. His work sits in the account of Sri Lankan modern art and has been shown at the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art Sri Lanka. The politician reduced at that breakfast table might have preferred the photograph; what he got was the truer likeness, and that likeness, multiplied across a decade, was in the end what drove its maker out.

Sources

1. Bandaranayake, Senake, and Albert Dharmasiri. Sri Lankan Painting in the 20th Century. Colombo: National Trust of Sri Lanka, 2009.
2. Tammita-Delgoda, SinhaRaja. George Keyt: The Absence of a Desired Image.
3. Weereratne, Neville. 43 Group: A Chronicle of Fifty Years in the Art of Sri Lanka. Melbourne: Lantana, 1993.
4. de Soysa, Rohan. ’The ‘43 Group: Origins, Aims, Activities and Legacy.’ National Trust of Sri Lanka, 29 September 2016. https://thenationaltrust.lk/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/The-43-Group.pdf