George Keyt

On the outer shrine walls of the Gotami Vihara at Borella, George Keyt set the life of the Buddha down at life size in the friezes he painted there across 1939 and 1940, and the calligraphic line he had drawn out of European modernism met the temple wall as though it had waited centuries for it. He had been raised to look the other way. Born in Kandy on 17 April 1901 into a middle-class family long since Westernised and Anglicised, and schooled at Trinity College in the town, he might have kept his back to the Buddhist and Hindu world about him. He turned into it instead, and made it the labour of a lifetime.

The turn was deliberate and it was learned, though its roots ran back to an early immersion in the Kandyan temple frescoes and the Jataka stories he had grown up beside. Keyt set the structure of Picasso and the line of Matisse against an older grammar, the forms of South Asian sculpture at Sanchi, Gandhara and Nagarjunakonda and the wall paintings of the island’s own temples; from that meeting he built a figure at once modern and unmistakably of the region. In 1940 he published a translation of the Gita Govinda, the Sanskrit cycle of Krishna and Radha, and later made a set of illustrations for it; the lovers of that poem returned again and again in his work, drawn in the sinuous, weighted contour that became his signature. The heroines of those years, the nayikas of Sanskrit convention, gave their name to the ‘Nayika’ period that ran through the 1940s and the 1950s. His connection with India was long and deep, and included a meeting with Rabindranath Tagore. Keyt himself marked the distance between his art and Deraniyagala’s: where Deraniyagala, he said, ‘paints women’, he ‘paints woman’.

In August 1943 he was among the painters who met in Colombo and resolved that the island would have a modern art of its own; he became a founder member of the ’43 Group and, in time, its best-known figure. That standing owed something to an unlikely ally. Martin Russell, a British serviceman posted to Ceylon during the war, bought the whole of Keyt’s showing at the Group’s first exhibition in 1943, and in 1950 published the monograph that carried the painter’s name to Europe; he kept Keyt’s London paintings and corresponded with the artist for decades, and the archive he left behind, passed down through his family, is now part of the record of Keyt’s life.

Others saw early what Russell had seen. Pablo Neruda, who had served as Chile’s consul in Ceylon, wrote of the Sinhalese figures that they ‘take on a strange expressive grandeur and radiate an aura of intensely profound feelings’. The judgement has held. Keyt’s work is held today in the Victoria and Albert Museum in London and the National Gallery of Modern Art in New Delhi; he was appointed MBE in 1953; and in the late 1980s the artist and his admirers established the George Keyt Foundation in Colombo, which continues to gather and show his work and to support the wider art of the island.

He worked on into old age, his manner settling in the later decades into a formula that some critics have judged repetitive, the sinuous lovers reprised past the point of fresh discovery, and he died in Colombo on 31 July 1993. The murals at Borella remain where he left them, the modern line still lying easily along the temple wall, the proof of a man who found his whole subject in the tradition he had been taught to overlook.