Born in April 1901, George Keyt, Sri Lanka’s most celebrated painter, died 32 years ago. His work lives on through his influence and various studies done on his life – including one that was published just last year.

During his life and after his death, he became the subject of several studies by Sri Lankan and foreign scholars. Today his paintings have found their way to some of the biggest art collections in his country, as well as to art auction houses Christie’s and Sotheby’s.

Taken together, his works represent some of the finest examples of modern art in Sri Lanka and Asia. They have also become symbols of Asian modernism.

Hailing from the mountainous region of Kandy, some 75 miles from Sri Lanka’s capital Colombo, George Keyt came from a middle-class family of Burghers -- an ethnic group derived from Portuguese and the Dutch colonisers.

By the 20th century the Burghers had acquired a distinct identity in Sri Lanka and were dominating professions such as law and medicine. They had acquired a respectable, if intermediate, social position, not unlike the Anglo-Indian community and were Westernised and Anglicised, like the Keyt family.

Turning away from his Christian, Westernised upbringing, Keyt embraced Buddhism and learnt Sinhala, the language of Sri Lanka’s ethnic majority, along with Pali and possibly Sanskrit, from Buddhist monks.

As a young student, Keyt attended Trinity College, the leading school in Kandy, founded by Anglican missionaries in the 19th century. Here, he acquired a rather notorious reputation. He found lessons boring and was constantly punished by his teachers for not paying attention. Yet he read widely, encouraged by the principal, Alexander Garden Fraser. Something of a nonconformist himself, Fraser took a great personal interest in Keyt. These interventions moulded Keyt.

Indian influences

One of the great influences on young Keyt was Mediaeval Sinhalese Art (1908), a book on Kandyan culture by the Oriental scholar Ananda Coomaraswamy. Moved by Coomaraswamy’s insights on Kandyan art and craft, Keyt visited the temples of Kandy.

Cultural elites tended to dismiss the murals in these temples as inferior, but for Coomaraswamy they exemplified rich patterns and beliefs. For Keyt they acquired a living relevance. He began to focus on Buddhist themes in his first few essays and drawings.

In the 1940s Keyt discovered the art and culture of India. At the height of World War II, he travelled to India, and visited the shrines at Bhubaneswar and Konark. While there, he forged connections with eminent Indians, like the novelist and activist Mulk Raj Anand and painter M. F. Husain.

These friendships came to the fore in 1947, when Mulk Raj Anand brought together a group of like-minded personalities to organise an exhibition of Keyt’s paintings at the Convocation Hall of the University of Bombay, India. These included the European émigrés Walter Langhammer, Rudolf von Leyden, and Emanuel Schlesinger; the nuclear physicist and ‘Renaissance Man’ Homi Bhabha; the criminal lawyer Karl Khandalavala; the art collector and gallery owner Kekoo Gandhy; and the publisher Manu Thacker.

In his own country, three acclaimed studies on Keyt were published during his lifetime - he passed away in 1993 - by those who had the chance to meet and converse with him.

One was by his close friend Martin Russell, an essay titled George Keyt, published by Marg (1950), the art and architecture magazine founded by Mulk Raj Anand.

In 1989 another close friend, the Sri Lankan bibliographer and librarian H. A. I. Goonetileke, published George Keyt: A Life In Art, a concise book referring to Keyt’s earliest paintings which have rarely been evaluated in relation to his wider career.

Then, the anthropologist Dr. Sunil Goonesekera wrote a monograph on him, Intepretations, published by the Institute of Fundamental Studies in Kandy, 1991.

Albert Dharmasiri, a painter-scholar who also knew Keyt personally, authored George Keyt: A Portrait of the Artist (National Trust of Sri Lanka, Colombo 2020).

The Indian art historian Yashodhara Dalmia, who never met Keyt, wrote a comprehensive study on Keyt, which remains an indispensable guide to his work, Buddha to Krishna: Life and Times of George Keyt (Routledge, 2017).

Cultural modernism

The latest addition to the literature on Keyt is the recently published coffee-table book George Keyt: The Absence of a Desired Image (Taprobane Collection, Colombo, 2024) by Dr. SinhaRaja Tammita-Delgoda, a leading Sri Lankan art historian.

The exhaustive study examines Keyt’s childhood, his engagement with Buddhism and Sinhala culture, and his later immersion in Hinduism. Replete with a comprehensive list of sources, hitherto unpublished works, it includes paintings, photographs, and interviews with those who knew, or knew of, its subject.

The Taprobane Collection, which published this book, holds one of Sri Lanka's most extensive collections of paintings, art works, artefacts, and other historical objects, including a number of paintings by Keyt and his contemporaries. It also possesses images, photographs, and material on Keyt.

The Absence of a Desired Image sheds light on four areas relevant to Keyts’ life and works, that place the book apart from earlier works.

First, it charts Keyt’s evolution as an artist including his early life, framing it as a distinct phase in his career, and not just a prelude. Dr. Tammita-Delgoda also goes into Keyt’s friendship with the photographer and critic Lionel Wendt, also a Burgher, with great detail and depth.

One of the pioneering avant-garde artists of modern Asia, Wendt was instrumental in introducing to Keyt the latest artistic trends of Europe and the West. Keyt in turn introduced the Colombo-born and raised Wendt to the culture, society, and ethos of Kandy.

Second, the Tammita-Delgoda book features never-before published paintings, photographs, images, and illustrations, incorporating archive material from several libraries.

Third, it sheds light on Keyt’s contribution to cultural modernism in India and Asia.

And fourth, the book references out-of-print publications and includes those that have never been assessed in the context of Keyt’s career. One of the most important in this regard is The Story of India, published in 1949 and was illustrated by Keyt. The author, Indian novelist Mulk Raj Anand entrusted Keyt, a Sri Lankan, with drawing the more than 50 drawings in the book – an indication of how Keyt was received by India’s literary and artistic community.

The prominent Pakistani art historian Niilofur Farrukh told Sapan News from her base in Karachi that seeing Keyt as the ‘Asian Picasso’ is unfair, as it implies he was “so derivative of Western artists” that he possessed little artistic agency of his own - which is clearly untrue.

This calls for a radical revaluation of not just Keyt but also many of his contemporaries in South Asia, including, most prominently, M. F. Husain, whose work as Tammita-Delgoda’s biography illustrates, owed much to Keyt.

Cultural modernism in South Asia is obviously indebted to European modernism, which emerged in the wake of the First World War, “when artists and thinkers were rebelling against norms,” as Farrukh notes. South Asian artists and thinkers saw that rebellion “as a point of departure for expressing their opposition, if not resistance, to colonialism and tradition,” she adds.

The latest study of Sri Lanka’s most internationally acclaimed painter offers a detailed portrait of the artist, shedding light on previously overlooked aspects of his life and work. What emerges is a vision of George Keyt who continues to be celebrated for his bold fusion of Eastern themes and Western techniques

(The writer is an international relations analyst, researcher, and columnist who works as the Chief International Relations Analyst at Factum, an Asia-Pacific focused think-tank based in Colombo, Sri Lanka. Email: udakdev1@gmail.com.By special arrangement with Sapan)