An Imaginary Museum or a Museum Without Walls:David Paynter and L.T.P. Manjusri

by Laleen Jayamanne

“David Paynter is a great master of painting…his talent and greatness were not properly identified and well appreciated by the Sri Lankan society while he was alive. However, his artistic capability has been well recognised and appreciated where he studied, in England and in Italy. Most of his paintings consist of Sri Lankan vegetation…his paintings and murals are landmarks of Sri Lankan Christian Art. His palette was very broad with sensitive tones and he was brilliant in painting figurative forms.” “David Paynter Untold Story,” Catalogue Essay, 2015 (p.5). Professor Sarath Chandrajeewa

Because he died intestate, David Paynter’s sister Eve Darling who inherited all his paintings bequeathed them to the Faculty of Visual Art of the University of Visual and Performing Arts via professional guardians, with strict instructions to adhere to her brother’s wishes that none of them should be sold. But they were in fact sold illegally and that tragic saga of recovery is on the public record. After a protracted legal process, the stolen paintings and drawings were found and now hang in the specially created J.D.A. Perera Gallery in the Faculty of Visual and Performing Arts.

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Despite numerous calls for it, what’s still missing is a National Collection of Lanka’s Modern art, at the Colombo Museum. Just recently, a group of writers published a piece in The Island, calling for the preservation of what’s left of the artwork done by the artists of the Aragalaya. They suggested that the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art should consider doing that. I had earlier made a friendly suggestion that the Museum document the cultural events at gotagogama, where art and politics intersected so vibrantly and surprisingly as never before in Lankan history. In the 1950s when as children we were regularly taken to the Museum by our school, St Bridget’s Convent, we were excited to miss class and never tired of re-seeing Sri Wickremarajasingha’s throne and the life-sized models of the stone-age Vaddha family arranged next to their cave dwelling. We said, ‘katugeta yanawa’, (going to the house of bones). Our katuge was built in 1877 and appears to be slowly developing into a national museum for the 21st Century with a separate Natural History wing as well. Paul Deraniyagala, its first Lankan director from 1939-63, was a zoologist by training, and so the collection he assembled had a paleontological focus on fossils of plants and animals and ancient geological rock formations. These revealed the pre-historic evolution of life on the island, which included human bones popularly referred to generically as ‘Balangoda man’. Perhaps this is the origin of our vernacular usage, ‘katuge,’ or more properly kauthukagaraya. The word ‘Museum,’ however, has a Greek derivation from ‘museion’ which means the shrine of the nine muses who are thought to be the inspirational source of all the arts and also history and astronomy.

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Nazreen Sansoni, director of Barefoot Gallery, expressed the problem well when she said, “The country has produced some talented people. But if you can’t get the government to push it, you can’t get anywhere.” She believes that Sri Lankan art would progress by leaps and bounds if only the private sector and the government could join to support the artists”. (Smriti Daniel, ScrapBook: Chandrajeewa; News Papers & Magazines Collections from 1985-2010, ed. Malsha Fernando, 2011, p. 87).

Chandrajeewa himself, in his role as art historian, has said much the same in relation to the paintings of J.D.A. Perera, David Paynter and Stanley Abeysinghe who headed the National School of Art and Crafts in the earliest decades of the 50s and 60s. He has said, “All these three principals were great pioneer painters in Sri Lanka during the 20th Century”. They taught painting at the art school in a variety of styles (modernist, academic, crafts/design), and also exhibited their own work, once in a group show in 1949. As friends, they would meet regularly and discuss each others’ work. Paynter had an international profile, having been trained at the Royal Academy of Art on scholarship and spent time in Italy and France on a travelling scholarship to study art. If their work

was readily accessible together with the work of the 43 Group in the National Museum, it would be possible to research the interrelationships between this group of artists at the art school, and the more programmatic modernists of the 43 Group. Rohan de Soysa, in his essential account of the 43 Group mentions that both Ivan Peries and Aubrey Collette, two founding members of the 43 Group, studied with Paynter for a short period. In the very small, largely Anglophone art world (with the notable exception of Manjusri thera), centred mostly in Colombo 7 (at Alborada, Wendt’s residence and Heywood, the early name of the art school), it is hard to imagine that they didn’t communicate with each other. Did they see each other’s work for example? And if so what did they think about it, one wonders.

The progressive British educator and painter C. F. Winzer, who had studied modernist art in Paris in his youth, was appointed the Chief Inspector of Art at the Dept. of Education between 1920-32 and became a catalyst in creating institutions promoting modern practices of art education in colonial Ceylon. In his professional role he came into contact with artists who were also art teachers like J.D.A. Perera and W. J.G. Beling, who he promoted as local pioneers of Secondary and Tertiary level art education in the country. Winzer’s friendship with Wendt in the 30s, according to de Soysa, quietly laid the foundation for the formation of the 43 Group, of which Beling was a founding member.

Oral History

J. D. A. Perera, Paynter and Stanley Abeyratne and Tisse Ranasinghe (all very dedicated teachers), were adversely affected when the dominant Sinhala-Buddhist-nationalist ideology on art and culture (as a result of the 1956 Sinhala only Bill), came to dominate the ethos of the art school. In contrast, the 43 Group founded in 1943 was able to flourish independently thanks to Lionel Wendt’s visionary patronage and bequest, which was later used judiciously by his friend Harold Peiris (as the executor of his will and patron of the arts), to create the invaluable Theatre and Art Gallery in his name. Soon after Wendt’s untimely death in ‘44 the artist Harry Pieris took the initiative to guide the group and its widening circle, building on the pioneering work done by Wendt. Pieris had taught for three years at Tagore’s Shantiniketan in Bengal and knew Sanskrit and prior to that had his training at the Royal Academy of Art in London and also in Paris. It was during his time at Shantiniketan that he was able to guide Manjusri thera who came there to study Chinese and Chinese art, to go to Tibet and Sikkim to be trained in the Mahayana visual traditions by the court painter. He already knew Pali, Sanskrit and Bengali. It was Harry Pieris who also astutely advised Manjusri to take back to Ceylon the drawings he had made of Lankan Buddhist temple paintings, instead of gifting them to Shantiniketan. According to de Soysa, it was also Harry Pieris who saved a large part of the neglected Lionel Wendt collection (deteriorating in a basement), from been auctioned off in 1963. This formed the 43 Group collection at the Sapumal Foundation which he established at his home.

I know of one artist, Nadine David, who studied drawing with Paynter for three years at Heywood and after he left the art school she continued her studies with him at the farm he set up in the east coast for adolescent boys who had left the Paynter Children’s Home in Nuwara Eliya, which was established by his family as a home for abandoned children of mixed race. Interviewing now aging students who have studied with some of these master artists who were also dedicated teachers would be such a rich way of doing a bit of oral history of a period now perhaps mostly lost to memory and history. The ‘guru-Shishya’ transmission of skill and energy is a precious, value-laden exchange even in a non-Indian, ‘westernised’ Lankan context, from which we can learn.

Namal Avanthi Jayasinghe, in her fascinating book investigating Manjusri’s Surrealist affiliations, has revealed some important biographical information through a valuable interview she conducted over the phone, with one of Manjusri’s daughters, Manjista Manjusri, who is also a painter. She informs us that most of his later work is deposited in a ‘safe vault,’ which is not accessible even to her. Jayasinghe’s book ends with three extraordinary images from temple paintings. There appears to be a very rich, wild folk-imagination here for artists to draw from. Elaborating on this aspect, Jayasinghe makes the astute theoretical argument that there is a surrealist dream logic operative in these ‘surreal’ images of interlinked human-animal-vegetal forms. The three sets of images are as follows: the ‘Mara Yuddha’ from the late 18th Century, from the Rajamaha Vihara, Dambulla, which has a marvellous mixture of human and animal forms. The ‘Pathala Lokaya’ and ‘Asura Nikaya’ from 1930s at Gothabhaya Rajamaha Vihara, Bothale, show horned small human figures in a desolate nether world with smooth faces without features and grotesque skeletal bodies drained of a capacity to feel! As I first glanced at these two images without reading the text, I was sure they were Latin American Surrealist images rather than temple paintings from Sri Lanka! Jayasinghe argues that their structure is surrealist, in the expanded sense derived from Freud’s theory of the unconscious and the analysis of dreams, of strange juxtapositions, violation of both scale and organic logical linkages in favour of dream logic. The distinction between ‘historical Surrealism’ launched by Andre Breton in the 1920s and the older and far wider sense of the word proves to be a very productive move for Jayasinghe’s analysis of Manjusri’s work. So, if Manjusri’s surrealist inflected art is exhibited in a national collection with some of these proto-surrealist temple paintings they would be more accessible to artists to study than his celebrated book, which I imagine is a collector’s item. Jayasinghe characterises Manjusri as an artist-scholar who did extensive research into temple painting in the country, later became a journalist and then an artist who travelled and exhibited his work in Europe over a period of time as well. She reveals some astonishing statistics about his intellectual stamina and passion:

“He has published 155 articles in Sinhala and 55 articles in English in his effort to bring to public awareness the ancient and medieval temple art of Sri Lanka. His book, ‘Design elements from Sri Lankan temple paintings’, contains 159 plates of designs, from 75 temples.” In, “An Investigation of the Appearance of Surrealism in the 20th Century Sri Lankan Paintings; with reference to an analysis of the paintings of L.T.P. Manjusri” (The Contemporary Art and Crafts Association of Sri Lanka: Colombo, 2021, p.78).