George Claessen

George Claessen came to painting late and by his own road. He was a draughtsman at the Colombo Port Commission, a man of twenty-nine and largely self-taught, when he began to paint in earnest, and he carried that exactness of the drawing board with him for the rest of his working life. Where several of his fellows had trained in studios and academies, Claessen taught himself to see, and a critic caught the parallel, likening him to Henri Rousseau, the customs officer who painted; the independence of that beginning marked everything that followed.

He was born in Colombo on 5 May 1909. When the painters who had broken from the Ceylon Society of Arts met in August 1943, Claessen’s own work among those the Society had refused, he was among them, a founder of the ’43 Group and its first treasurer; he showed in the collective’s first exhibition later that year. His early work kept the figure, but the pull was already towards something barer, and around 1947 he moved into pure abstraction, the only one of the founders to do so, and without abandoning the other half of his practice, for he went on painting portraits, figures and still lifes beside the abstract work. Of that figurative side, Mother and Child of 1943, an oil on jute, survives in the H.A.I. Goonetileke collection. Later writers have judged him the most intellectual and conceptual of the Group, the one who reasoned his way towards pure form.

His drawings reached a public early. In 1946 a slim volume of them, George Claessen Drawings, appeared in Colombo under the Jataka imprint, edited by the bibliographer Ian Goonetileke and prefaced by Arthur van Langenberg, the theatre director and calligrapher who was a fellow officer of the Colombo Port Commission, and it did much to set his name across the island in the years before the abstraction had fully arrived. Justin Daraniyagala, reviewing the drawings, thought the humility before the model their outstanding quality.

He spent the later 1940s in Australia and showed purely abstract work at Melbourne in 1947; in 1949 he settled in England, working again as a draughtsman until his retirement and painting towards light and pure form. The mysticism that ran through his outlook found its way into both halves of his life, for Claessen was a poet as well as a painter, and he set the two down side by side: Poems of a Painter appeared in 1967, Poems about Nothing in 1981, and a Collected Poems in 1995. The verse and the canvases answer to the same temperament, spare, inward and reaching for the immaterial.

The work travelled. Claessen’s painting was shown at the National Gallery in London in 1945, at the Venice Biennale in 1956 and at the São Paulo Biennale in 1959, where it was recognised with an award; in London he belonged to the New Vision Centre circle, holding a one-man show at its gallery in 1962, and to several of the city’s artists’ societies. Critics there read his luminous abstract fields as reaching after Monet’s last years at Giverny, quiet, deliberate and contemplative. He showed only rarely in Colombo, his working life and his exhibitions kept for the most part abroad. Through it all he held to the direction he had set in the 1940s, moving steadily away from the described world and toward light itself.

He died on 1 May 1999, four days short of his ninetieth birthday, in the country that had been his home for half a century. He had begun at a drawing board in Colombo harbour and ended in pure abstraction in England, a founder of the island’s first modern movement who, alone among them, followed the line until it left the visible world behind.

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. Goonetileke, H.A.I., ed. George Claessen Drawings. Colombo: Jataka, 1946. https://www.43group.org/chapters/select-bibliography.html
4. Arthur van Langenberg. Edited by Neville Weereratne. Colombo: Lionel Wendt Memorial Trust.
5. Weereratne, Neville. 43 Group: A Chronicle of Fifty Years in the Art of Sri Lanka. Melbourne: Lantana, 1993.