Ranjit Fernando

In the autumn of 1952 the paintings of a small group of Colombo modernists hung for the first time in Europe, in the Imperial Institute at South Kensington, and the man who had made that possible was not the most celebrated painter among them but their organiser, Ranjit Fernando. The ’43 Group had declared four years before the Bombay Progressives that this island would have a modern art of its own; carrying that art across the world, and persuading foreign rooms and foreign critics to take it seriously, was a separate labour, and it fell to him. His is the story of the enabler, the figure whose service to a movement outran his own ambitions as a painter.

He came to art through the movement’s own teaching line. He was a nephew of Harry Pieris, the Group’s quiet anchor, and he learned first under Aubrey Collette in the art classes at Royal College before working on, in the main, self-taught. As a painter his voice was gentle: critics of the day described his landscapes, loosely handled and half-abstract in their pale, gentle greens, as purely personal work, free of any particular influence, and he showed them in the Group’s exhibitions through the 1950s.

His lasting contribution lay abroad. He was, by the Group’s own chronicle, entirely responsible for its exhibitions overseas, beginning with London in 1952 and following with Paris, Venice, Sao Paulo and Cambridge. The effort reached its fullest statement in October 1960, when the Ceylon Tea Centre gallery in London showed ‘Ceylon: A Painter’s Country’, a survey that set out to illustrate the practice of painting in Ceylon from the fifth century to the present day, and for which the English critic Sir Herbert Read wrote the preface. To bring a colonial art before a London public under Read’s imprimatur was a real act of advocacy, and it belonged to Fernando.

On his return to the island his energies turned inward and outward at once. He taught at Cora Abraham’s art classes, one of the seedbeds from which the next generation of Sri Lankan painters grew, and he later edited and published ‘The Unanimous Tradition: Essays on the Essential Unity of All Religions’, a book whose concerns lay with the meeting of faiths rather than with the studio. In time he gave up painting altogether.

What he leaves is a particular kind of importance, structural rather than shown on a wall: the movement that insisted on a sovereign Ceylonese modernism reached Europe because one of its own arranged the passage, and then, his work done, quietly stepped out of the frame he had built for others.