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Lionel Wendt (1900-1944)
Sri Lanka
Jeanloup Sieff (1933-2000)
France
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Lionel Wendt Memorial Fund inaugurated the Harold Peiris Gallery at the Lionel Wendt Art Center, December 3 2000, to mark the Centenary of the birth of Lionel Wendt.
The Gallery presented an Exhibition of original photographs of Lionel Wendt with the launching of
Lionel Wendt - A Centennial Tribute
Numbered edition with hard cover of 250 photographs.
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The Fukuoka Asian Art Museum in Japan has organised, in October 2003, a photographic exhibition entitled
'Modern Artists III - The Gaze of Modernity'
featuring a wide range of modern photographic works by
Sri Lankan photographer Lionel Wendt (1900-1944).
The exhibition continues till October 28.
Ill.: Title unknown (Collection - Nalin Tomar and Mahijit Singh, Delhi)
Lionel Wendt was born on December 3, 1900 in Colombo, Ceylon.
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" The pianist, photographer, critic, and cinematographer,
Lionel Wendt was the central figure of a cultural life torn between the death rattles
of the Empire and a human appraisal of the untapped values of Ceylon. "
His friend Ricardo Neftali Reyes Basoalto (1904-1973), consul of Chile in Ceylon,
well known as Pablo Neruda, Memoirs.
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The most famous photographer of Sri Lanka, Lionel Wendt, occupied a central place in the artistic life of his country. He was an intellectual, and knew also to give life to a plentiful artistic expressions like music, painting, photography and cinema.
With B. G. Thornley and P. J. C. Durrand, in July 1935,
he initiated the "Photographic Society of Ceylon".
His contribution was essential in the formation of the "43 Group"
whose the inaugural meeting was held in Wendt's house, 18 Guilford Crescent, on the 29th August 1943.
At this place now stands the Wendt Memorial Theatre. The objective was to regroup some independant painters,
such as George Keyt and Ivan Peries - artists who are now recognized as the best
representatives of the mid-century modernism in Asian art.
He took part in many exhibitions in Sri Lanka between 1935 and 1944.
His photographs were exhibited in Europe, America, South Africa and Asia...
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It is important to highligt the Exhibition "Camera-Work", presented in 1940 in Colombo with 267 prints. There, he embraced the main aspects of the Sri Lankan life and culture,
to which he was thoroughly attached.
His themes are marked by richness and diversity : landscapes, daily life -
without forgetting its social dimension -, architecture et archeology, photo-montages with details of a
human chest or a fresco, portraits, particularly the nudes where he likes to depict the aesthetic
value of the human body...
He found the way to harmonise his knowledge and interest for modern expressions of
art (Magritte, Man Ray, Chirico...) with his concern on the representation of traditional
aspects of the Sri Lankan life. His fertile imagination uses a range of technical processes
: photo-montage, photo-collage, solarization, relief prints, photograms...
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He was close to the realism of
Jean-Eugène Atget (Jean-Eugène Atget ,1857-1927, father of the photo-reportage), the surrealism of Man Ray and the social documentary of the photographers of the FSA (Farm Security Administration, USA).
It was on the site of his house that, soon after his untimely death, was created
the Lionel Wendt Art Gallery under the auspices of the Lionel Wendt Memorial Fund.
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The role of Lionel Wendt in Sri Lankan painting stands "in the same
relation the photographer Man Ray stood to French."
W. G. Archer
India and Modern Art, London, 1959. |
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- Lionel Wendt's Ceylon, first edition 1950, Lincolns - Prager Publishers London, reedition, Navrang, Lake House Bookshop, 1995.
- Lionel Wendt Photographs, Catalogue of the Exposition, "Rediscovering Lionel Wendt" by Manel Fonseka, Lionel Wendt Memorial Fund, 1994.
- Lionel Wendt A Centennial Tribute, The Lionel Wendt Memorial Fund, 2000.
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Read more
Lionel Wendt and George Keyt — a close-up
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Being in Colombo between the 4th and the 17th December 2000, we had the wonderful opportunity to visit the Lionel Wendt Gallery (18, Guilford Crescent, Colombo)
where some 99 works of a great Sri Lankan photographer were exhibited .
It was a homage to Lionel Wendt on the 100th anniversary of his birth.
If we can appreciate the richness and the diversity of his talent with the use of many technical processes, the most attractive is the Wendt's ability to show the lines of a face or a body which are caressed by a soft light, the same light which naturally caresses the ancient woods of Embekke.
There, we meet sculpture and dance in a celebration of the fascination for beauty.
The Lionel Wendt Gallery stands in the charming "Cinnamon Gardens" with the Viharamahadevi Park. In the close proximity, the National Museum.
Suriyakantha
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Jeanloup Sieff died the 20th September 2000.
Well-known photographer, we remember his portraits of celebrities : Yves Saint-Laurent, Alfred Hitchcock, Françoise Sagan, François Mitterrand and Jean-Paul Sartre, and of his American landscapes, particularly the Death Valley (1977).
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Born in Paris in 1933, he was of Polish origine and pursued his career of photographer by essentially focusing on four themes : fashion, landscape, portrait and nude.
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In 1986, there was a Retrospective Exhibition in the "Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris". He received, in 1992, an important award, the "Grand Prix National de la Photographie".
He was used to telling to his models : "Faites comme si je n'étais pas là..."(Behave as I am not here..). His work is marked by a progressive development of contrasts between black and white and a more and more expressionist tendency.
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He qualified himself as a "lazy, superficial, and frivolous photographer...". His work is full of nostalgy and melancholia, and emotion as it appears in this quotation of Jeanloup Sieff :
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"I remenber some accidental euphoria, a spring morning, that originates from the unpredictable encountering of a sun's ray, a forgotten smell and a childhood memory..." |
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On the book-shelves of our library
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Demain le temps sera plus vieux
(Time will pass like Rain)
Ed : Taschen
Faites comme si je n'étais pas là
Rencontres et portraits
Ed : De La Martiniere Eds
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Emile-Antoine Bourdelle (1861-1929),
sculptor and... photographer.
It is beautiful being,
but how much it is moving when we feel ouselves becoming.
Emile-Antoine Bourdelle
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L'Oeil et la main (The Eye and the Hand) :
Bourdelle and the photography
A recent exhibition of 200 prints.
Musée Bourdelle
16, rue Antoine-Bourdelle, 75015 Paris.
Tel : 00 33 1 49 54 73 73
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It is during the night
that Bourdelle liked to photograph his sculptures...
by using lights from below
in order to emphasize forms.
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For the first time, an exhibition was organised from the photographic collection of the Bourdelle Museum.
The theme concerns "Bourdelle and his work" with views of his studio and his sculptures.
This collection contains more than 2500 paper prints and 6000 negatives.
The exhibition "L'Oeil et la main" displayed a totally new selection of more than 200 photographies - paper prints, negatives, stereoscopic views - in association with plaster casts, sculptures, and drawings which have been specially restaured for this exhibition.
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