Lionel Wendt

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Lionel Wendt (born December 3, 1900 , † December 19, 1944 in Colombo ) was a Sri Lankan pianist, photographer, director and critic. He was the head of Gruppe 43, a Sri Lankan artist collective that consisted of George Keyt and Harold Peiris, among others.

The Lionel Wendt Art Center, dedicated to him, is an important Colombo institution for art and theater.

biography

His father, Henry Lorenz Wendt, came from the Burgher community, which consists of mixed descendants of European settlers. As a Supreme Court judge and legislative adviser, he was also a founder of the Amateur Photographic Society of Ceylon (1906). In turn, his mother, Amelia de Saram, was Sinhalese. As the daughter of a district judge, she was an active social worker and organized numerous concerts for non-profit organizations. Lionel's father died when he was less than eleven years old and his mother less than seven years later.

Despite his remarkable musical talents, Wendt's family traditions and habits prevented him from pursuing a purely musical career. In 1919 he went to London to study law at the Inner Temple . The English capital offered him the opportunity to complete further training as a pianist at the Royal Academy of Music under the direction of Oscar Beringer. These years in Europe were an opportunity for him to discover the artistic movements of this era: surrealism , cubism ...

In 1924 he returned to his home island. Although he was admitted to the Ceylon Supreme Court, he practiced little law. He preferred to give public piano recitals, both as a soloist and as an accompanist. In 1928 he gave up the right to music and developed an interest in avant-garde music.

Lionel Wendt became the main figure of the only circle of avant-garde artists of that time, whose members also included his childhood friend, the painter George Keyt. In his autobiography, the poet Pablo Neruda , Chilean consul in Colombo 1928–1929 writes :

I note that the pianist, photographer, critic and cinema man Lionel Wendt was the center of cultural life, which fluctuated between the rattle of the empire and a return to Ceylon's virgin values. This Lionel Wendt, who owned a large library and always got the latest books from England, had taken on the unusual and good habit of sending a cyclist loaded with a sack of books to my house, which was far out of town, every week.

Lionel Wendt and his friends tried to contribute to the formation of a modern national consciousness. They firmly believed that the future of their country could not be built by neglecting an old legacy or rejecting the Western way of life, but that it lay in the union of the two.

photography

In the early 1930s, Lionel Wendt passed on public piano recitals. However, he will discover a new passion: photography. It is said that Wendt found photography to be the ideal vehicle for promoting the values ​​and lifestyle of Ceylon residents.

In 1934, Wendt and some photographer friends revived the Amateur Photographic Society of Ceylon , which was founded by his father and then renamed the Photographic Society of Ceylon , which is still active today. Between 1935 and 1944 he took part in numerous exhibitions in Ceylon. His photographs have also been exhibited in Europe, particularly in 1938 at a Leica- sponsored solo exhibition at the Camera Club in London.

Wendt reflected the culture of his country through his photographs. If the masculine body is his favorite topic, it is also about landscapes, everyday life, architecture and archeology. He combined knowledge and interest in modern artistic movements ( Magritte , Man Ray , Chirico ...) with the aim of depicting traditional Ceylonese life. His vigorous imagination required a multitude of techniques: photo montage , photo collage , solarization , relief printing , photogram … Wendt was sensitive to Eugène Atget's realism, Man Ray's surrealism and the social documentation of the Farm Security Administration photographers .

Song of Ceylon

In 1934 the British director Basil Wright combined Wendt with the development of his documentary Song of Ceylon . Wendt, named by Wright as one of the six best photographers in the world, isn't just the film's narrator; his photographic eye and his extensive knowledge of the country and its culture were an important contribution to this documentary, which is regarded as significant. In an interview published in Mosquito (the Ceylon student magazine in England) in 1949 , Basil Wright paid tribute to Lionel Wendt:

Without him, this film couldn't have been what it is. Because here was a man who knew Ceylon like few men did, and he was in touch with the avant-garde cinema of the time and he knew what the documentary filmmakers were doing. In fact, the only two people I met in Ceylon who knew anything about films at the time were Wendt and George Keyt.

The collaboration between Wendt and Wright will continue after the filming of Song of Ceylon . The photographer stayed in London several times to become Wright's assistant in the company he founded. Wendt was the first Ceylonese to establish a relationship between photography and cinema when the latter developed on the island in the 1930s.

Patron of art

Lionel Wendt and George Keyt played a leading role in promoting Kandyan dance. They acted as true patrons of dancers and drummers from the Kandy area: Suramba and his brother Jayana from Anumugama village, Ukkawa and his brother Gunaya from Nittawela. These artists will be among the most talented and well-known representatives of the Kandyan dance.

Lionel Wendt's contribution to the development of modern painting in Sri Lanka cannot be overstated. Wendt was a subscriber to numerous art and literary magazines such as The Studio , Cahiers d'art , Minotaure, and Transition, and was the most dedicated protector of a group of painters. He bought some of their works, organized exhibitions, and defended these painters in the newspapers.

Group 43 was founded in Colombo on August 29, 1943 with Lionel Wendt as the lead partner. The inaugural meeting of the group took place in their home. The aim was to bring together independent artists such as George Keyt, Ivan Peries and Justin Daraniyagala, who today are among the best representatives of mid-20th century modernism in Asia.

Disappear

Lionel Wendt died of a heart attack in Colombo on December 19, 1944. The Lionel Wendt Art Center will be built on the site of his house at 18 Guilford Crescent.

Unfortunately, as was common in the industry, Wendt's negatives were destroyed by an executor. However, a limited number of his prints survived.

literature

  • Lionel Wendt, Leonard Colvin van Geyzel: Lionel Wendt's Ceylon . Lincoln's-Prager Publishers, London 1950 (English, 255 p., Technical note by Bernard G. Thornley).
  • Lionel Wendt, Manel Fonseka: Lionel Wendt: a centennial tribute . The Lionel Wendt Memorial Fund, Colombo 2000 (English, 293 pages).
  • Lionel Wendt, Manel Fonseka, Raiji Kuroda: The Gaze of Modernity: Photographs by Lionel Wendt . Museum of Asian Art in Fukuoka, Fukuoka 2003 (Japanese, English, 63 p., Original title: ラ イ オ ネ ル ・ ウ ェ ン ト 写真 展: 「近代」 の ま な ざ し . Published for the exhibition from August 21 to October 28, 2003.).
  • Lionel Wendt, Shanay Jhaveri, Stephan Sanders, Nicky van Banning: Lionel Wendt - Ceylon . Fw: Books, Amsterdam 2017, ISBN 978-94-90119-49-2 (English, 224 pages, published from June 10 to September 3, 2017 for an exhibition at the Museum of Photography Huis Marseille in Amsterdam.).

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ A b Manel Fonseka: A man with a vision . In: Sunday Times . Colombo November 26, 2000 (English).
  2. ^ Lionel Wendt, Leonard Colvin van Geyzel: Lionel Wendt's Ceylon . Lincoln-Prager, London 1950, pp. 11-14 (English).
  3. ↑ Meyer-Clason, Curt,: I confess, I have lived: memoirs . 2nd edition Luchterhand, Darmstadt 1974, ISBN 3-472-86388-9 .
  4. ↑ Ellen Dissanayake: Renaissance man: Lionel Wendt - creator of a truly Sri Lankan idiom . In: Serendib . tape 13 , no. 3 , 1994, p. 16-22 ( ellendissanayake.com ).
  5. ↑ a b Tampoe, Vilasnee .: Cinéma et colonialisme: naissance et développement du septième art au Sri Lanka (1896–1928) . Paris 2011, ISBN 978-2-296-56176-2 .
  6. ^ Song of Ceylon: a flashback . In: Mosquito: the Ceylon Students Quarterly . No. 3 , March 1949, p. 17-18 (English).
  7. ↑ Tampoe-Hautin, Vilasnee .: Cinéma et conflits ethniques au Sri Lanka, vers un cinéma cinghalais indigène, 1928 à nos jours . Harmattan, Paris 2011, ISBN 978-2-296-56177-9 .
  8. ^ Reed, Susan Anita, 1957-: Dance and the nation: performance, ritual, and politics in Sri Lanka . University of Wisconsin Press, Madison, Wis. 2010, ISBN 978-0-299-23164-4 .
personal data
SURNAME Wendt, Lionel
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Sri Lankan pianist, photographer, director and critic
DATE OF BIRTH 3rd December 1900
DATE OF DEATH December 19, 1944
Place of death Colombo