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 two are recorded 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, sculptor’s 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 ‘a credit to this department’, made with ‘obvious sincerity’. Sculpture was his whole contribution to the Group: 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; that his sculpture stood among the first works shown is the place he holds in its story.

Sources

1. Weereratne, Neville. 43 Group: A Chronicle of Fifty Years in the Art of Sri Lanka. Melbourne: Lantana, 1993.
2. Weereratne, Neville. ‘Once and Future Artists’. The 43 Group. https://www.43group.org/chapters/chapter-14-once-and-future-artists