George Keyt
Grade 10 · ART · Sri Lankan Artists
An introduction to the Sri Lankan artist George Keyt, exploring his life, artistic style, influences, and selected works, including his contribution to modern Sri Lankan art.
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George Keyt (1901-1993) is the pivotal figure in Sri Lankan modern art: trained in a Western, modernist idiom influenced by Cubism, but working almost entirely with Sri Lankan and South Asian subject matter - Buddhist and Hindu mythology, village life, and murals at the Gotami Vihara in Colombo. His figures show flattened, angular forms and fractured planes clearly indebted to Cubism, combined with the linear elegance of Ajanta and Sigiriya-style painting.
Questions about Keyt are really questions about synthesis: how a modern, foreign visual language (Cubism) was used to paint a specifically local subject, rather than simply imported wholesale. That's the one distinguishing feature worth having ready, since it's what separates him from both the earlier Ceylon Art Society painters and from the European modernists he was influenced by.
