Untitled (Sri Lankan Woman)

"Keyt I think is the living nucleus of a great painter. In all his works, there is the moderation of maturity. [His] figures take on a strange expressive grandeur, and radiate an aura of intensely profound feeling." (W.G. Archer, India and Modern Art, London, 1959, p. 124)
George Keyt did not start painting until he was 26, but he quickly went on to become arguably Sri Lanka's most celebrated 20th Century artist. Lot 212, Sri Lankan Woman painted as early as 1932, is a rare example of Keyt's early style influenced by the prevailing Ceylon Society of Arts which advocated a Western 19th Century realist aesthetic. This delicate work precedes the revolutionary radical break associated with the '43 Group. Instead Keyt reveals a subtlety of color and line particularly in rendering the sculptural elements of drapery. A few flattened angles on the face and the monochrome background, deliberately devoid of depth, anticipate Keyt's artistic trajectory.

Lot 218, House, with its flattened elements and Cubist vocabulary show how Keyt by the 1950s had already developed a mature, unique visual dialect that combined European Modernist innovations with the ancient South Asian fresco techniques found at Sigiriya and Ajanta. It was Picasso's Cubism with its fractured planes and multiple perspectives that influenced Keyt's aesthetic from the 1930s onwards. According to Keyt, it was Charles Freegrove Winzer, the Ceylon Governments' Inspector of Art, who first introduced him to the European Modern masters that would forever change his classical style. "Winzer provided a window into a fresh and unfamiliar world of painting. He introduced them [and fellow '43 Group members] to the work of the Impressionists; to Pissarro, Manet, Renoir, Degas, Cezanne, Gauguin, Van Gogh; and Picasso and Matisse." (G. Keyt quoted in, N. Weereratne, 43 Group: A Chronicle of Fifty Years of Art in Sri Lanka, p. 16)

"Keyt takes as his primary theme woman as the focus of man's concern. He paints her in flat planes, with bounding lines and rich warmth of color. His idiom occasionally carries in it a hint of Picasso but is, once again, in direct line with the traditional styles of Central India, Mewar, and Basohli. But the originality of Keyt's inspiration is undoubted, and his work remains uniquely his own." (R. Bartholomew and S.S. Kapur, Husain, Abrams, New York, 1971, p. 27) Despite his clear admiration for Cubist and Fauvist principles, Keyt's subject matter, sentiment and treatment of figures remained rooted in the vernacular and traditions of his native Sri Lanka. Throughout his lifetime, Keyt's work was exhibited alongside leading European artists in galleries around the world. Most notably, in 1930, he exhibited alongside Picasso and Braque at the Zwemmer Gallery in London. Pablo Neruda wrote the introduction for the catalogue of this exhibition.