Lionel Wendt - Ceylon - 2017

Shanay Jhaveri, Stephan Sanders, Nicky van Banning, texts - Lionel Wendt. Ceylon - Amsterdam, Fw: Books, 2017 - First edition - 224 pages - Hardcover with mounted plates on covers - With 142 (partly captioned) photographs - 22.5 x 17 cm.

* Lionel Wendt. Ceylon offers a representative overview of the unique oeuvre of the Ceylonese photographer Lionel Wendt (1900-1944). It contains some 150 reproductions, the majority of which have never been published before. In the 1930's, Wendt grew to become a prominent avant-garde figure in the Ceylonese art world and as a photographer he experimented with technologies such as photogram, photomontage, double printing and solarisation. After his sudden death in 1944 his negatives were destroyed, but hundreds of prints survived to bear witness to his eclectic taste: from sensual homoerotic portraits to pictures of Ceylon's nature and culture...

The book contains 3 articles/ essays on Wendt:

- Indian art historian Shanay Jhavari looks at Wendt from the perspective of the dichotomy between East and West in the history of modern art and photography
- Essayist Stephan Sanders reflects on the subject of boys in Wendt's oeuvre, which makes his photographs the ultimate testimony for his modernism
- Art historian Nicky van Banning, in her biographical article, assesses the merits of Wendt as a self-assured photographer with artistic aspirations *

[Texts taken from last endpaper]

- Published on occasion of an exhibition in Huis Marseille Museum for Photography Amsterdam, based on a provenance of hundreds of prints that were discovered in a storage facility in Colombo in the 1990's

* Condition: Very good *