Lionel Wendt

In a darkroom off Guilford Crescent in Colombo a print rises in the developer, its tones reversing to silver where the light has been made to turn back on itself, and the man bent over the tray is the one figure at the centre of Ceylon’s first modern movement who never lifted a brush. Lionel Wendt saw; he did not paint. To understand how a photographer came to convene the painters who remade the island’s art, you have to begin with a man who belonged wholly to no single part of the society he documented.

He was born in Colombo on 3 December 1900, into the Burgher community, the mixed-descent minority that traced its line to Europeans settled on the island; his father, Henry Lorenz Wendt, sat as a Supreme Court judge and helped found the colony’s photographic society. Lionel was sent to England, read law at the Inner Temple and trained as a concert pianist at the Royal Academy of Music, and he came home with a European education and a growing conviction that the island’s art had been kept in borrowed clothes. He gave up the law within a few years. He gave his energy instead to music, to criticism, and above all to the camera.

His photographs treated Ceylon as a living culture rather than a colonial picture: a Kandyan dancer preparing his costume for the perahera, the drummer Surumba at his work, fishermen and estate labourers, the temple line and the ceremonial mask. He built these images through the full modern repertoire, photomontage, the photogram, double printing and solarisation, so that the documentary subject and the experimental surface held together in a single frame. Among the pictures he kept largely to himself was a body of male nudes, sensuous and unguarded, made at a time and in a place where such desire was criminalised; they are now read as the most candidly personal seeing he did, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art holds examples.

On 29 August 1943 the painters gathered at his home and the ’43 Group was founded with Wendt as its leader, the patron and critic whose eye and whose rooms gave the movement its centre. He did not live to see it mature. He died of a heart attack on 19 December 1944, at forty-four; his negatives were destroyed after his death and his reputation lapsed for decades. The book ‘Lionel Wendt’s Ceylon’ was assembled from surviving prints and published in 1950. His house became the Lionel Wendt Memorial, still Colombo’s principal art centre and theatre, designed from the drawings of his fellow Group member Geoffrey Beling. In 2017 his photographs were shown at Documenta 14, carrying the island’s modern eye back into the room where the wider world was looking. The man who never painted had, in the end, taught a generation how to see.