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 the draughtsman’s exactness 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 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 was among them, one of the artists present at the founding of the ’43 Group; he showed in the collective’s first exhibition later that year. His early work kept the figure, but the pull was already toward something barer, and around 1947 he moved into pure abstraction, going further from representation than any other member of the Group. He was the only one of its founders to become an abstractionist, and he did so without abandoning the other half of his practice, for he went on painting portraits, figures and still lifes beside the abstract work. Later writers have judged him the most intellectual and conceptual of the Group, the one who reasoned his way toward pure form.

He spent the later 1940s in Australia, where he showed purely abstract work at Melbourne in 1947, and in 1949 he settled in England, where he worked again as a draughtsman until his retirement and painted toward 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 and to several of the city’s artists’ societies. 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 near-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.