Lancelot Ribeiro

2 - 27 June 2021

Grosvenor Gallery are delighted to share the news of the recent acquisition by Tate of six works by Lancelot Ribeiro (1933-2010). The acquisition includes the oil; Cityscape (Night),1963, the oil and PVA; The Warlord (Psychedelic Man Series), 1966, as well as four works on paper from 1964.

KNMA, New Delhi, have also acquired two large scale paintings; The Business Luncheon, 1966 and The Offering, 1966.
- Untitled (Drawing), 1964
- Untitled (Drawing), 1964
Close
"I AM UTTERLY DELIGHTED THAT THE TATE HAVE CHOSEN THESE PARTICULAR PLAYFUL ARTWORKS FOR THEIR COLLECTION. THAT HIS FAVOURITE - THE WARLORD - SITS AMONG THEM, HAS AN ADDED POIGNANCY FOR ME AND IS AN ACHIEVEMENT THAT I AM SURE WOULD HAVE MADE HIM PROUD."

MARSHA RIBEIRO, MAY 2021
Lanceloté José Belarmino Ribeiro was born in Bombay (now Mumbai) in 1933. His mother, Lilia, made her living as a tailor and milliner, operating her business out of the family's third floor flat in ‘Hira Building’. His father, João, was an accountant. He had a half-brother, the artist Francis Newton Souza (1924-2002) and a sister, Marina. They were surrounded by a cluster of protective grandmothers and three loving and glamourous aunts.

Bombay was a lively and cosmopolitan city and still in an India under the British Empire. It was strategically situated for trade and industry and a thriving centre for the arts, culture and sciences which would inevitably mould Ribeiro's encyclopaedic knowledge. Hira Building overlooked Bombay's famous Crawford Market and through Ribeiro's formative years was a place where communities lived peacefully side by side.

The family split their time between Bombay and their ancestral home in Goa, a picturesque state on India's west coast which had been a ‘possession’ of the Portuguese Empire for 400 years. Goa's landscape left a deep imprint on Ribeiro and was a world away from the turbulent events unfolding in ‘British India’. It would not gain its independence from Portugal until 1961.
Ribeiro's photograph of the fields of Goa

“...Arriving in Goa from Bombay by air is just 40 minutes but as these minutes go by the change in the landscape is staggering. The choked barrenness of the first 35 minutes give the feeling that whatever vegetation there is blisters and turns to the colour of ash... And then! As if in the 36th minute you see Goa bursting from the lip of the Arabian Sea... It was this visual beauty that made the Portuguese hold on to Goa so doggedly... who felt Goa should remain as it always was – Goa Dourado [Golden Goa]”.

-Ribeiro, undated diary entry
Ribeiro returned to Bombay in 1955 after five years in Britain. It was his first solo show at Bombay's Artist Aid Salon (1961) which launched his career as a painter. It set his destiny as an artist in a direction that sometimes, he felt, was beyond his control. It won him an early patron in the form of Homi Jehangir Bhabha, the nuclear physicist and founding director of Tata Institute of Fundamental Research and Trombay Atomic Energy Establishment. Bhabha secured him a commission from Tata Industries to paint the 12-foot ‘Urban Landscape’ mural for the Chairman and Chief Executive of Tata Iron and Steel, J.R.D. Tata. Further collector interest would soon follow. This included the trio of Jewish émigrés who had helped develop India's nascent modern art scene - Rudi von Leyden, Walter Langhammer and Emanuel Schlesinger, who had escaped Europe's Holocaust.
Urban Landscape, 12-foot mural, Bombay House, 1961 (Tata collection)
His first paintings, produced in 1958, were oil townscapes on paper. Painted in an expressionist manner, these architectonic pieces, he explained, had a deliberate “structural and linear aspect” and were darkly-coloured with flashes of colour, imbued with the imprint Goa had left on him. His icon-like heads which would soon follow - often of Christ, bishops or saints - were also drawn from the Christian tradition.

“MY FIRST INFLUENCES... WERE THE CHURCHES AND STATUARY OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH IN GOA ALONG WITH THE SYMBOLIC RITUAL THAT WENT WITH IT. THE OTHER AND PERHAPS THE STRONGEST INFLUENCE WERE THE PAINTINGS OF MY BROTHER 10 YEARS SENIOR.”

RIBEIRO, 1972, COMMONWEALTH INSTITUTE LECTURE
- Artworks
  Lancelot Ribeiro
  Strange Town, 1962
  Oil on board
  
  91.5 x 80 cm
  36 1/8 x 31 1/2 in
- Artworks
  Lancelot Ribeiro
  Untitled (Landscape with Pink Sky), 1965
  Oil on board
  Signed and dated lower right
  30.5 x 28 cm
  12 1/8 x 11 1/8 in
- Artworks
  Lancelot Ribeiro
  Untitled (Landscape with Red Sun), 1965
  Oil on board
  Signed and dated lower right
  30.5 x 28 cm
  12 1/8 x 11 1/8 in
- Artworks
  Lancelot Ribeiro
  Green Landscape, 1966
  Oil on canvas
  Signed and dated 'Ribeiro 60' (lower right); signed and dated 'Ribeiro 60', inscribed 'GREEN LANDSCAPE' and bearing Grosvenor Gallery label (on the reverse)
  60 x 47 cm
  23 5/8 x 18 1/2 in
- Artworks
  Lancelot Ribeiro
  Untitled (Goan Landscape with Black Sun), 1962
  Oil on board
  61.5 x 125.5 cm
  24 1/4 x 49 3/8 in
Ribeiro's youth spent in a cosmopolitan and vibrant Bombay undoubtedly nurtured his life-long interests which included music, literature, philosophy and astronomy. His artistic temperament was also shaped by the open house atmosphere of Hira Building where artists, writers and poets came and went. He had witnessed his brother's career emerge and known Souza's circle of artists and friends.

Ribeiro was, however, still a poet at heart and the only painter reading his work at British Council poetry-readings.

“In April 1962 ... the American poets Allen Ginsberg, Gary Snyder, and Peter Orlovsky were in Bombay. After their reading on the terrace of theater director Ebrahim Alkazi's house on Warden Road, Nissim Ezekiel, Adil Jussawalla, Lance, and I, together with the American poets, walked down to Ezekiel's apartment at 67 Breach Candy. When we got there, Ginsberg wanted to know what Indian poets were like...”

From ‘Remembering Lance Ribeiro’ R. Parthasarathy's essay, ‘Restless Ribeiro’, 2012
UPON THIS DARK STAIR WITHIN YOUR MIND

WITH NO RAIL TO HOLD
SET DOWN YOUR SOUL,
WITH EYE WIDE OPEN.
AND YOU SHALL FALL
UNSEEING.
AS I AM FALLING.
TO NO KINGDOM
AND NO DYING.

FROM RIBEIRO'S ‘THE RISEN VOICE’, C.1961
Ribeiro held exhibitions in several of London's leading West End galleries of the day, including the Piccadilly, Crane Kalman, Rawinsky and Mount Galleries. It featured in Nicholas Treadwell's mobile art galleries - a fleet of double-decker buses and vans which took art into Britain's suburbs to potential customers who had walls “waiting to be filled”.

At the end of 1962, having had nine solo and group shows, Ribeiro and his wife decided to settle in Britain where he felt he would thrive.

(Larger version of this image opens in a popup).

(Larger version of this image opens in a popup).

(Larger version of this image opens in a popup).

(Larger version of this image opens in a popup).

(Larger version of this image opens in a popup).

(Larger version of this image opens in a popup).

(Larger version of this image opens in a popup).
In the early 1960s, Ribeiro broke away from the structural forms of his earlier works, to begin an intensive experimental phase. Patrick Boylan noted traditional painting techniques had “begun to wear thin on this restless young painter”. In his search for a new medium, the new synthetic plastic bases that were being introduced for commercial paints caught his interest and so began ‘several hundred’ experiments on hardboard, plywood, canvas and paper using Polyvinyl Acetates (PVA) at different rates of plasticity.

With guidance from companies such as ICI, Courtaulds, Magros and Ciba Geigy, Ribeiro began exploring colouring and pigmentation, producing experimental mixes of oil paints, high dispersal dyes and PVA. Intrigued by his experimentation, these companies provided Ribeiro with free samples of PVA from their industrial stock, the smallest a 22-gallon drum, alongside small bottles of coloured dyes. This triggered a new abstract and semi-abstract style. His landscapes and still lifes had a distorted perspective while ‘heads’, such as The Warlord, utilised a “root or tuber-like form which was to be the nucleus on which all the work since 1965 was based”.
“WHAT I HAVE TRIED TO DO IS TO TAKE A PAINTING AND BREAK IT DOWN - SOMEWHAT LIKE A CHILD'S JIGSAW PUZZLE AND THEN RECONSTRUCT THE WHOLE AGAIN EMBRYONIC STYLE.”

RIBEIRO, 1972 COMMONWEALTH INSTITUTE LECTURE
- Lancelot Ribeiro
  Untitled (Dripping Head), 1966
  Oil and polyvinyl acetate on canvas
  52.5 x 41 cm
  20 5/8 x 16 1/8 in
- Lancelot Ribeiro
  Untitled (Dripping Figure), circa 1966
  Oil and polyvinyl acetate on canvas
  126.5 x 96.5 cm
  49 3/4 x 38 in
  Inscribed 'RIBEIRO' on the stretcher and stamped by the Artist's Estate on the reverse
Close
Retracing Ribeiro
Selected Exhibitions
Selected News Articles
Available Publications
BIOGRAPHY
Click below to discover more about the artist as well as available works
- Artists
  Lancelot Ribeiro
  1933 - 2010

Lancelot Ribeiro

Cityscape (Night), 1963

Untitled (Drawing), 1964

Untitled (Drawing), 1964

Untitled (Drawing), 1964

Untitled (Drawing), 1964

"I AM UTTERLY DELIGHTED THAT THE TATE HAVE CHOSEN THESE PARTICULAR PLAYFUL ARTWORKS FOR THEIR COLLECTION. THAT HIS FAVOURITE - THE WARLORD - SITS AMONG THEM, HAS AN ADDED POIGNANCY FOR ME AND IS AN ACHIEVEMENT THAT I AM SURE WOULD HAVE MADE HIM PROUD."

MARSHA RIBEIRO, MAY 2021

Ribeiro's photograph of the fields of Goa

-Ribeiro, undated diary entry

“MY FIRST INFLUENCES... WERE THE CHURCHES AND STATUARY OF THE CATHOLIC CHURCH IN GOA ALONG WITH THE SYMBOLIC RITUAL THAT WENT WITH IT. THE OTHER AND PERHAPS THE STRONGEST INFLUENCE WERE THE PAINTINGS OF MY BROTHER 10 YEARS SENIOR.”

RIBEIRO, 1972, COMMONWEALTH INSTITUTE LECTURE

Lancelot Ribeiro

Lancelot Ribeiro

Lancelot Ribeiro

Lancelot Ribeiro

Lancelot Ribeiro

From ‘Remembering Lance Ribeiro’ R. Parthasarathy's essay, ‘Restless Ribeiro’, 2012

UPON THIS DARK STAIR WITHIN YOUR MIND

WITH NO RAIL TO HOLDSET DOWN YOUR SOUL,WITH EYE WIDE OPEN.AND YOU SHALL FALLUNSEEING.AS I AM FALLING.TO NO KINGDOMAND NO DYING.

FROM RIBEIRO'S ‘THE RISEN VOICE’, C.1961

“WHAT I HAVE TRIED TO DO IS TO TAKE A PAINTING AND BREAK IT DOWN - SOMEWHAT LIKE A CHILD'S JIGSAW PUZZLE AND THEN RECONSTRUCT THE WHOLE AGAIN EMBRYONIC STYLE.”

RIBEIRO, 1972 COMMONWEALTH INSTITUTE LECTURE

Retracing Ribeiro

Selected Exhibitions

Lancelot Ribeiro, An Artist in India and Europe

Indian Modernist Landscapes, 1950-1970, BAKRE/RIBEIRO/SOUZA

Lancelot Ribeiro, A Voyage of Discovery

Lancelot Ribeiro: An Artist in India & Europe

Selected News Articles

Art UK - The Roots of the Indian Artists' Collectives

Retracing Ribeiro | Burgh House & Hampstead Museum

Lancelot Ribeiro

Lancelot Ribeiro

Lancelot Ribeiro

Painting a Picture of Ribeiro's Life

Available Publications

Lancelot Ribeiro, An Artist in India and Europe

Restless Ribeiro, An Indian Artist in Britain

The Roots of the Indian Artists' Collectives

BIOGRAPHY

Lancelot Ribeiro

WITH NO RAIL TO HOLD
SET DOWN YOUR SOUL,
WITH EYE WIDE OPEN.
AND YOU SHALL FALL
UNSEEING.
AS I AM FALLING.
TO NO KINGDOM
AND NO DYING.