Lancelot Ribeiro

Lancelot Ribeiro (28 November 1933 – 25 December 2010) was an Indian modern artist. According to the Independent, he is considered to have been at "the vanguard of the influx of Indian artists to Britain."[3]

Lancelot Ribeiro
Born(1933-11-28)28 November 1933
Bombay (Mumbai)
Died25 December 2010(2010-12-25) (aged 77)
London
Alma materSt Martin's School of Art, London. St Mary's Senior Cambridge School, Mount Abu, Rajputana. St Sebastian's School and St Xavier's High School for Boys in Bombay.[1]
StylePainting
MovementModern art, Post War Indian expressionism[2]
Websitelanceribeiro.co.uk

Early life

Lancelot Ribeiro was born in 1933 in Bombay, India to accountant Joao José Fernando Flores Ribeiro and his mother Lilia. He was the half-brother of artist F.N. Souza. Ribeiro moved to London in 1950, living with his brother and studying accountancy. He abandoned this career when attending life classes at St Martin's School of Art between 1951 and 1953. He served in the RAF in Scotland, then returned to Bombay. After working with Life Insurance Corporation, he began working professionally as a painter in 1958.[3]

Career

Ribeiro's creative life spanned half a century, during which time he became known for a "huge body"[3] of figurative and abstract work.[3] From 1951 until 1953, he joined art classes at Saint Martin's School of Art, London.[2] In 1958, he began painting professionally.[3] 1960 saw him organize his first solo exhibition, Bombay Art Society Salon.[2] It was soon sold out. Five other exhibitions followed this in Bombay (Mumbai), New Delhi and Calcutta (Kolkata).[3] 1961 saw his first solo art exhibition at the Bombay Artist Aid Centre. It was included among the Ten Indian Painters exhibition., and was given an extensive tour of India, Europe, US and Canada. He also received a commission for a 12-foot mural for the Tata Iron and Steel Company.[3]

He returned to London with his wife in 1962. There he received a grant from the Congress for Cultural Freedom in Paris. He held mixed shows at Piccadilly, Rawinsky, John Whibley and Crane Kalman galleries in London and Galerie Lambert, Paris. He received an All India Gold Medal nomination.[3] 1963 saw him co-found the Indian Painters’ Collective.[2] In the 1960s and 1970s he held both solo and group shows. Ribeiro lectured on Indian art and culture at Commonwealth Institute.[3]

A retrospective covering his 1960s work was held in 1986 at Leicestershire Museum and Art Gallery.[3] In 1987 his work was displayed at Camden Arts Centre.[3] In 1998, his work was displayed at LTG Gallery, New Delhi.[3] He displayed one painting at British Art Fair, 2010 after a long absence.[1] Ribeiro died in 2010 in London.[3] In 2013 there was a retrospective exhibition at Asia House, London in May–June.[2] An exhibition was scheduled for New Delhi in November.[2] In November 2016, as part of the 2017 UK-India Year of Culture, the exhibition Ribeiro: A Celebration of Life, Love and Passion was held in association with the British Museum and other institutions.[4]

Style of art

Ribeiro's creative life spanned half a century, during which time he became known for a "huge body"[3] of figurative and abstract work. Among his artistic productions were portrait heads, still lifes, landscapes, and pigment experiments dating back to the early 1960s which "lead to works of peculiar brilliance and transparency."[3]

It is suggested that Ribeiro had a hand in completing some of his brother Souza's art works. Ellen Von Weigand wrote that "Souza's success and resulting social life meant that he frequently left works unfinished. Ribeiro would complete them, using the painter's harsh, aggressive strokes to form his church spires, iconographic heads and anti-naturalistic still-lives. His brother would then return to add his hasty signature to the finished piece."[5]

Role of acrylics

In a longish obituary, The Times of London acknowledges Ribeiro's role as an "[a]cclaimed Indian artist who pioneered the use of acrylics in the 1960s, producing a brilliancy of colour in his expressionistic works".[6] The paper talks of Ribeiro's "increasing impatience" by the 1960s over the time it took for oils to dry, as also its "lack of brilliance in its colour potential." He took to the new synthetic plastic bases that commercial paints were beginning to use, and soon got help from manufacturers like ICI, Courtaulds and Geigy. The companies supplied him samples of their latest paints in quantities that he was using three decades later, according to the paper. Initially, the firms thought the PVA compounds would not be needed in commercially viable quantities. But they quickly recognised the potential demand and "so Ribeiro became the godfather of generations of artists using acrylics as an alternative to oils."[6]

Reception

The British mainstream media has said:

"Lancelot Ribeiro was one of the most original Indian painters who settled in Britain after the Second World War. Although there has been a surge of dealer and collector interest in artists from the subcontinent, Ribeiro remains relatively unknown compared with contemporaries such as his half-brother FN Souza, Avinash Chandra, Balraj Khanna and Anish Kapoor."

— The Independent (London)[3]

See also

References
  1. "Ribeiro: The Artist". lanceribeiro.co.uk. Retrieved 11 March 2017.
  2. Von Weigand, Ellen. "Lancelot Ribeiro: Vanguard Indian Painter of Post War Britain". TheCultureTrip.com. The Culture Trip. Retrieved 11 March 2017.
  3. Buckman, David (3 April 2011), "Lancelot Ribeiro: Artist in the vanguard of the influx of Indian artists to Britain", The Independent, retrieved 11 March 2017
  4. Remembering Lancelot Ribeiro and other Indian artists in 1960s Britain, British Museum, 2016, retrieved 11 March 2017
  5. Weigand, Ellen Von. "Lancelot Ribeiro: Vanguard Indian Painter of Post War Britain".
  6. "Lance Ribeiro". The Times. 24 January 2011. Retrieved 11 March 2017.

Further reading
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