RAY FUNK
Keith Atteck has had his life transformed in the last four years into that of art historian, curator –and really, as he puts it, “detective,” as he has become deeply involved in researching the life and art of his famous aunt, Sybil Atteck (1911-1975).
Atteck was one of TT’s most important visual artists and a founder and early leader of the Trinidad Art Society. She made a major contribution to the development of Caribbean art. She taught, inspired and influenced many local artists from the 1950s to her death in 1975.
Atteck is believed to have been the first Caribbean artist to exhibit at the Royal Academy in London and contributed to over 75 exhibitions during her career, not just in Trinidad and Tobago but in the US, Canada, Jamaica, the Bahamas and the UK.
In the last few years her art has been featured in major exhibitions in the US and elsewhere. She will be featured in a book to come out later this year provisionally titled Great Women Painters.
Atteck was born in Tableland in south Trinidad, and moved with her family to Rio Claro as a child, but grew up in Port of Spain from the age of 12. Early on, she had an interest in art, and later studied it in England, Peru, and the US. She supported herself through her art and later teaching art in several secondary schools in Port of Spain.
[caption id="attachment_966359" align="alignnone" width="1024"] Keith Atteck shows of one of Sybil Atteck's paintings. -[/caption]
Keith’s mother Helen Atteck, ran the Sybil Atteck Art Galleries started in 1962, first at the newly opened Trinidad Hilton Hotel and later at the Salvatori Building on Frederick Street. When the Art Society was struggling to find exhibition space, other artists had solo exhibitions in these galleries, among them Leo Glasgow and Edwin Hing Wan.
Keith grew up near his Aunt Sybil’s home and spent time with her. She wanted him to draw, but he wanted to play cricket and football and never took up art. He moved to Canada with his parents as a teenager and Sybil died just a few years later.
While Atteck’s art was always part of the family legacy, Keith went on to engineering and project management, eventually working as a consultant in information management in the public and private sectors. It was only decades later, in 2018, in helping his mother try to figure out the authenticity of a painting said to be by Atteck, that he caught the bug, and he’s since become obsessed with documenting her life and work.
He has had to learn many new skills in investigating the provenance and authenticity of art, how one builds a catalogue raisonne of an artist’s work, identifying what images survive of Atteck’s art, what her signatures look like, what subjects she painted and when, what shows her pieces appeared in over the decades, and finding newspaper reviews and long-lost catalogues that discuss her art – and hopefully don’t just list them but have images of them. He has been tracing catalogues of Atteck’s exhibitions at major galleries such as the Commonwealth Institute in London.
