Ralph Claessen

When the ’43 Group opened its first exhibition in Colombo in November 1943, almost everything on the walls was paint. Among the exceptions were the sculptures of Ralph Claessen, worked in lead, chalk and clay, one of the few three-dimensional voices in a movement that history remembers as a company of painters.

He shared the surname, and the founding moment, with George Claessen, the painter and later abstractionist who is the better-known Claessen of the Group; the record of the movement carries the two as brothers. Where George would go on to a long career in England, Ralph’s exhibiting life with the Group was brief and his was the quieter, more three-dimensional gift.

He sat on the Group’s founding committee and showed from the inaugural exhibition onward. A reviewer at the fourth show found his pieces in lead, chalk and clay ‘a credit to this department’, made with ‘obvious sincerity’. The sculpture was the whole point of him: at a moment when the Group was arguing for a modern Ceylonese art largely through painting, Claessen put the same argument into three dimensions, and the founding rooms were the wider for it. He stopped exhibiting with the Group after those early shows.

In 1948 he emigrated to Australia, and he died in Melbourne in 1987. The founding of the ’43 Group is usually pictured as a gathering of painters, yet the first rooms held his sculpture too; the movement’s beginnings were three-dimensional as well as painted, and that is the place Ralph Claessen holds in the record.