Modern
In 1943 a circle of painters broke from Colombo's academic salon and gave European modernism a form entirely of the island. By 1955 it hung at the Venice Biennale. This was the '43 Group, gathered here with the salon masters it broke from and the wider circle of the modern decades.
“The true artist is not one who is inspired, but one who inspires others.”
Salvador Dalí
The '43 Group
The circle that gathered at Lionel Wendt's Colombo home in 1943 and resolved that Ceylon would have a modern art of its own. Its founders, the members who later joined, and the guests who showed with them broke from the academic salon, and what they began remains the pivot of the island's art.
The Salon Masters
The painters of the academic establishment, upholders of the salon tradition and the Ceylon Society of Arts, whose manner the '43 Group set out to break with. Accomplished within their own convention, they are the ground the modern movement measured itself against.
The wider circle
Figures of the modern decades who stood outside both the '43 Group and the salon: the teachers who trained the modernists, and others who kept to their own road.
