Justin Daraniyagala

In a Cambridge ring in the mid-1920s a slight, spare Ceylonese law student won his bantamweight Boxing Blue, fighting well above the promise of his frame, and the economy he learned there, the discipline of a man who cannot waste a movement, is the first thing to understand about Justin Daraniyagala the painter. He came to art through structure rather than through charm, distrusted the easy effect for the rest of his life, and wanted a picture built to carry its weight to every corner of the canvas, nothing slack. He seldom judged a canvas finished, reworking the paint until it lay in ridges like geological strata, and he rarely signed or dated what he made. Ivan Peries called him ‘the painter’s painter’, and the judgement was about craft rather than fame.

The heritage

Daraniyagala was born in Colombo on 20 July 1903, into one of the most distinguished of the low-country Sinhalese families, and the household prized learning as a matter of course. His father, Sir Paul Pieris, was a senior civil servant and a historian of Ceylon, the author of some eighteen works of history, and in 1917 the University of Cambridge made him an honorary Doctor of Letters, the first Asian to be so honoured. The line behind him ran back through courtiers and commanders of the Sinhalese kingdoms; through his mother, Hilda Obeyesekere, he was cousin to S.W.R.D. Bandaranaike, who would lead the island after independence, and in 1940 he stood as best man at Bandaranaike’s marriage to Sirima Ratwatte. His brother Paules Edward Pieris Deraniyagala became a noted zoologist and director of the National Museum, and his sister Miriam was the mother of the cellist Rohan de Saram. Justin never married, and painting, rather than office or scholarship, became the labour of his life.

Cambridge, the Slade and Paris

He was taught the fundamentals of drawing by Mudaliyar A.C.G.S. Amarasekara, one of the island’s celebrated portrait painters, and he left for England with a sound hand and a strong record in sport. At Trinity College, Cambridge, he read for a degree in law and made his first name in the boxing ring rather than the studio, a champion fighter before he was ever a painter. The prestige of the Cambridge law degree and the celebrity of the ring were both powerful levers for a career, and he forfeited them for painting. Encouraged by Augustus John, he entered the Slade School of Fine Art in London, under Henry Tonks and Philip Wilson Steer, where he carried off the school’s first prize for drawing, and in 1928 he moved on to the Académie Julian in Paris. Paris opened his mind past the conventions of the Slade and the Royal Academy towards a far wider field, European, Asian and African at once, and he began the slow work of turning an academic gift into a language of his own.

The return, the masks and the prism

He returned to Ceylon in 1929 and set about developing his own manner, and the graceful line drawings of Sinhalese women and the ease of his early watercolours belong to those lighter, almost bohemian years. His reputation reached beyond the island: by the middle of the 1930s a Leicester Galleries catalogue in London listed his drawings alongside those of Picasso, Manet and Toulouse-Lautrec, the critic Eric Newton had taken note of him, and he went on to show at the Leicester and Redfern Galleries and to hold a one-man showing of his drawings at the Adams Gallery, warmly received. He shared a two-man exhibition with George Keyt in Colombo in 1936. His enquiry ran wider than the studio. He worked in the British Museum with the anthropologist Bronisław Malinowski, published on Ceylonese antiquities, and collected the Sinhalese sanni masks of the exorcism ritual, whose terrible faces surface again in his late paintings as fearful, unsettling presences; the collection had once been shown at the Musée de l’Homme in Paris. The bending of light through a prism or a lens absorbed him too; he kept acquiring optical glass to the end of his life and knew gemstones and their cutting expertly, and this pull towards the swerving of a ray ran in step with the deliberate reshaping of his sitters’ bodies. Tuberculosis, diagnosed in the late 1930s, closed that expansive world. In 1942 he withdrew to the family house at Nugedola, in the village of Pasyala, and there, in isolation, made the most acclaimed of his work. His cottage studio there held an Augustus John portrait of his father, drawings by Matisse and Modigliani, Moghul miniatures, South Indian bronzes and Sinhala masks, the range of his looking gathered in one room.

The founding of the ’43 Group

Daraniyagala was one of the founding members of the ’43 Group, the circle convened by the photographer and critic Lionel Wendt that met on 29 August 1943 and gave the island a modern art of its own, breaking from the academicism of the Ceylon Society of Arts. He was among its three leading painters, with George Keyt and Ivan Peries, and among the most difficult. Proud of his own judgement and unwilling to compromise, he lived apart and enjoyed the unorthodox, and at the Group’s opening he was seen delivering an unasked lecture on the nature of art to the scholar G.P. Malalasekera. After Wendt’s death in 1944 Harry Pieris held the Group together, and it went on showing until its sixteenth and last formal exhibition in February 1967, the year Daraniyagala died.

The painter’s painter

His subject was almost always the human figure, most often a woman, returning in a few recurring shapes, the mother and child, the bathers, the artist and his model, the Pasiphaë myth among them. His method was pressure: an urgent line that the London critic Eric Newton found had ‘more sinew and less elegance than Matisse’s’; colour used as architecture rather than description; the body held in a tension that never quite resolves. He reworked such pictures over and again, the surface thickening into strata, and left most of them unsigned because he seldom thought them done. His nephew Ranil dated his true emancipation to a run of pictures around 1940, The Careful Mother, The Bride and Girl with Goldfish among them, the last he thought one of the finest things Daraniyagala made. Ivan Peries’s phrase, ‘the painter’s painter’, named his enormous experience with the materials of the art; John Berger, writing in London, called him a philosopher painter, and observed that in a work as apparently tender as ‘The Dog’ the heart of tenderness is violence, and the heart of cruelty, timidity. A contrast is often drawn with George Keyt, that Keyt ‘makes pictures’ while Daraniyagala ‘makes paintings’, the one composing for the eye and the other labouring at the surface itself. His canvases reward the closest looking and give up little at a glance.

What he believed painting was

He set down his own creed in an essay, ‘The Appreciation of Painting’, found after his death in his hand, and it explains the pictures better than any account of them. An artist, he wrote, is a man able ‘to see more deeply and profoundly than the normal person’ and to communicate that seeing as ‘an all absorbing passion’, and the true end of art lies past mere objective fact, in an intangible world ‘accessible only to instinct and intuition’. Appreciation, on his account, is active work, a re-creation of the artist’s experience by the viewer, never the passive reading of a story or the mistaking of technical dexterity for aesthetic worth. Distortion, therefore, is ‘not only legitimate but of the very essence of art’, the selection and emphasis of the many forms latent in any object, and a painting must reach a ‘plastic unity’ in which colour, line, space and light are integrated and the subject stays subsidiary to the form. He defended Cubism and unrepresentational painting, set the spiritual ‘unity of all life’ of the Ajanta Bodhisattva painters against the individualising eye of Manet, held that a genuine artist can borrow a tradition’s devices without lapsing into academicism, and concluded that form and matter are inseparable, and that no two people, differing in experience and heredity, ever see the same picture. In the studio this became a practical discipline: he refused to let a composition fall away at its edges and carried it out to every margin, insisted on grasping a form in the round, the back of a head as much as its face, and built each image as a composite of several observations condensed within a single frame.

His influences

The modern masters he most admired he named without embarrassment, and he set out to learn from them and, where he could, to surpass them. From Matisse he took a method and a line; with early Picasso, the Spaniard he measured himself against and vowed to ‘knock off the walls’, he shared the analytic breaking of form; and Braque, Cézanne, Modigliani and the harsher Otto Dix stand behind his work as well, together with the Gauguin-to-Picasso current of European primitivism that looked to African masks and to the arts of Egypt, Peru and Cambodia. He read widely, the French poet Paul Claudel among his enthusiasms. Yet the deeper sources lay at home. The Sigiriya frescoes, the line of the Kandyan and Ajanta temple painters, the decorative liya-vela of Sinhalese silverwork and his own collection of masks fed the pictures as surely as Paris did, and it was the fusion, a new Europe read through a traditional Ceylon, that gave his work its particular authority. He knew the currents of the Indian subcontinent, Coomaraswamy and the Tagores, Amrita Sher-Gil and Jamini Roy and the Bombay progressives, yet held himself apart from them, aware but, by his biographers’ account, not influenced.

Recognition, and ‘The Fish’

The reckoning came through the ’43 Group’s exhibitions abroad in the 1950s. The Group showed at the Imperial Institute in London in 1952, drawing the notice of critics such as John Berger, whose foreword placed Daraniyagala among the twentieth-century masters of Expressionism, and Maurice Collis, and at the Petit Palais in Paris in 1953, where the French critic Georges Besson called him ‘one of the important revelations of our time’. A one-man show of his own followed at the Beaux Arts Gallery in London in 1954, a clear critical success: Maurice Collis found there ‘no expressionist painter in England today who is his equal in craftsmanship’, and G.S. Whittet of The Studio rated his Maternity above a Picasso the Tate had lately bought. He was invited to the Pittsburgh International in 1955 and again in 1957, taking a prize. At the twenty-eighth Venice Biennale, in 1956, his oil ‘The Fish’, painted in 1949, was chosen for a UNESCO prize from among more than four thousand seven hundred works, and it was afterwards reproduced by the New York Graphic Society for UNESCO’s World Art series of colour prints. The prize remains among the highest international honours a Ceylonese painter of his generation received, and it rested on a single unshowy picture of a fish, all structure and held colour. At the São Paulo Biennial of 1957 the Group’s showing took a further award, for his Composition of 1951. That same year he was elected a vice-president of the Ceylon national committee of the International Association of Art, and among the few private owners of his work were Monroe Wheeler and Indira Gandhi. He made little effort to build on the fame, and beyond the island his name is still less known than the work deserves.

Pasyala

Daraniyagala died at Pasyala on 24 May 1967, aged sixty-three, and left behind almost the whole of his output, most of it unsigned, and a collection of Sinhalese masks that had already begun to decay. Retrospective exhibitions followed at the Colombo Art Gallery in January 1968, at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington in 1969, and, in December 1992, Justin Daraniyagala: Paintings and Drawings in Colombo, and the core of his work is kept today at the Sapumal Foundation in Colombo, which holds the ’43 Group under one roof, and in private hands. The fighter’s economy stayed with him to the end: a man who painted as he had once boxed, giving nothing away, making every mark count.

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Sources

1. Daraniyagala. With essays by Shernavaz Colah, Neville Weereratne and Ranil Deraniyagala, and the artist’s own essay ‘The Appreciation of Painting’.
2. Bandaranayake, Senake, and Albert Dharmasiri. Sri Lankan Painting in the 20th Century. Colombo: National Trust of Sri Lanka, 2009.
3. Wikipedia. ‘Justin Pieris Deraniyagala.’ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Justin_Pieris_Deraniyagala
4. The ’43 Group. ‘The Painter’s Painter.’ https://www.43group.org/chapters/chapter-10-the-painters-painter.html
5. Halpé, Ashley. ‘Incandescence, Humanity and Modernism: The Art of Justin Daraniyagala’. John Keells Foundation. https://www.johnkeellsfoundation.com/news/incandescence-humanity-and-modernism-the-art-of-justin-daraniyagala-reviewed-by-ashley-halpe/
6. Weereratne, Neville. ‘Justin Daraniyagala: A Splendid Tribute to the Master’. John Keells Foundation. https://www.johnkeellsfoundation.com/news/justin-daraniyagala-a-splendid-tribute-to-the-master-reviewed-by-neville-weereratne/
7. The Sapumal Foundation, Colombo, holder of the core ’43 Group collection.