Ida Bagus Nyoman Rai: Bali's forgotten maestro<\/p>\n
By Jean Couteau<\/p>\n
SANUR, Bali (JP): It is not often that one gets in Bali the
\nopportunity to see a retrospective of the works of a great local
\n\"traditional\" artist. Because Balinese paintings are
\npainstakingly detailed, relatively few are produced by any single
\nartist and, once they are, it is to be sold abroad.<\/p>\n
This is why the present exhibition at the Four Seasons Resort
\nis not to be missed. The artist, Ida Bagus Nyoman Rai, 90, is
\narguably the most important surviving artist of the pre-war
\ngeneration, that which saw the burgeoning of the \"Balinese Pita
\nMaha Renaissance\". And, by a whim of fate, many of his works have
\nremained in the country, either in private collections or in
\nthose of the Ratna Warta, Neka and Arma museums.<\/p>\n
Identified and gathered by Ambar, the curator of the Ganesha
\nGallery, they are now being exhibited for a month from Nov. 8,
\naccompanied by an illustrated catalog on the Sanur School by
\nBruce Carpenter. Both the exhibition and the catalog were made
\npossible with the support of The Jakarta Post.<\/p>\n
Knowing this, and coming at a time when Christie's is selling
\nBalinese \"traditional\" paintings at ever higher prices in
\nSingapore, who would guess that the artist rewarded by this
\nexhibition, Ida Bagus Nyoman Rai, whose works illustrate among
\nother things Claire Holt's Art in Indonesia, would still be
\nliving, ignored, and one of the poorest citizens of Sanur, the
\nrichest tourist resort on the island.<\/p>\n
When I visited him a few months ago, ahead of this exhibition,
\nI expected to see if not luxury, at least a semblance of comfort,
\nof the kind one sees among the new Balinese middle-class: a large
\ngate, to show his brahminhood, a ceramic floor, a TV set and a
\nflock of noisy grandchildren in the background.<\/p>\n
What I found instead was a rundown wooden shack, without even
\nelectricity, in the outer yard of a brahmin's compound. Our star
\npainter had been completely bypassed by the prosperity enjoyed by
\nmost of his peers.<\/p>\n
Then I saw the man himself. I was expecting an \"artist\",
\nsomeone eager to talk about himself and his works -- aren't all
\nBalinese, these days, especially talkative on their role as
\n\"artists\"? What I found instead was a humble, smiling old man,
\nwho spoke no Indonesian and lived not only without children but
\neven without a woman to look after him.<\/p>\n
\"I never had one,\" he told me in high-Balinese, grinning.<\/p>\n
I smiled in return. Images of his paintings were coming to my
\nmind -- a youth pinching a woman's nipple, another snaring the
\npenis of a friend -- and only then did I realize the truth. Ida
\nBagus Nyoman Rai was this rare jewel of an artist: an authentic
\n\"naive\" artist, naive even within the framework of Balinese
\npainting.<\/p>\n
Ida Bagus Nyoman Rai is indirectly related to the pre-war
\nSanur School of painting, which survived until the seventies.
\nUnlike the Padangtegal and Batuan schools, in which Walter Spies
\nand Rudolf Bonnet transformed the Balinese \"system of form\" by
\nintroducing depth and pseudo-anatomy, the school of Sanur shows
\nlittle direct influence by Western artists. It grew instead out
\nof a commercial endeavor, that of the Neuhaus brothers.<\/p>\n
Arriving in Bali in the late 1930s, the Neuhaus brothers built
\nthe Sanur Aquarium to which they soon added a gallery. But they
\nneeded to fill the latter. So they went on the hunt for talents,
\ndistributing paper and materials to their local acquaintances.
\nThe results were stunning. Instead of the filled canvasses of the
\nhinterland schools, the locals were producing airy, black and
\nwhite works, where the sea played a prominent role. This became
\nthe Sanur School.<\/p>\n
Ida Bagus Nyoman Rai was never formally part of the Neuhaus
\nteam of painters, although he sold his works at the aquarium too.
\nBut he was well-introduced into the Western expatriate milieu. He
\nworked as the house boy of Theo Meier, a Swiss and another pre-
\nwar artist of Bali. It was the latter who provided him with his
\nmaterials and with encouragement. Carpenter says that the
\nartist's drawings were then \"full of spontaneous naivety (and)
\nhumor, (with) and almost surreal sense of proportion and
\nperspective\", and that he may have been indirectly influenced by
\nTheo Meier.<\/p>\n
He spent with him the war years. Later he became closely
\nassociated with the reputed Australian artist Donald Friend, who
\nowned a \"palace\" by the beach and surrounded himself with a court
\nof handsome Balinese ephebes. Although no ephebe himself, Ida
\nBagus Nyoman Rai would go there to paint on call for the weird
\n\"master\". His hand can be seen on some of Friend's works. After
\nDonald Friend's departure and, until recently, he was employed as
\na gardener at the Tanjung Sari hotel, whose owner is also one of
\nhis most faithful collectors.<\/p>\n
When one questions Ida Bagus Nyoman Rai on these \"friends\" of
\nthe past, all of whom were directly or indirectly related to the
\nart world and its market, what is striking is how little
\nimpression they have left on him. He talks about Tuan Be (Mr.
\nFish) -- one of the Neuhaus brothers -- Tuan Tio, Tuan Tonal and
\nothers. All, to him, were obviously Tuan or \"Masters\", thus part
\nof an alien, Western world, and with whom there was little
\ncommunication beside exchange of services and transactions -- at
\na minimum price.<\/p>\n
One can now easily guess that the Tuan were as keen and
\ndominant as the Balinese was naive and submissive. Even when it
\nwas \"productive\" the history of the encounter of the two parties
\nwas, unavoidably, that of colonial and\/or social inequality.
\nSlanted from the start.<\/p>\n
When Donald Friend allowed Ida Bagus Nyoman Rai to paint areas
\nof his canvases with waves and Balinese motifs, it was always on
\nhis own terms, never on those of Ida Bagus Nyoman Rai's.<\/p>\n
Ida Bagus Nyoman Rai, though, never questioned his
\npredicament. He was never, as an artist, the witness of what he
\nthought, but rather of what he felt. His works have all the savor
\nof immediacy and outspokenness. Adolescent games, the presence of
\nthe sea, courting, procreation, massaging, he tells the world as
\nit is to him, without any filtering. When he draws a youth
\nsnaring his friend's penis, he is not discoursing, as Donald
\nFriend would have it, on homosexuality, but simply depicting,
\nwith a naive humor, a play common among Balinese youth.<\/p>\n
His technique is no less direct: the surfaces are flat, with
\nthe characters drawn as he perceives them -- some overly large
\nand others too small -- rather than as they are \"objectively\".
\nOne of his drawings has for example a whale occupying most of the
\ncanvas. The stranded animal was such an event that, to him,
\neverything else shrunk by comparison.<\/p>\n
Whatever the theme, though, the artist's eye is ever present.
\nWhen he depicts human figures larger than nature -- in Rajapala,
\nfor example -- it is also because they are elements of his
\ncompositions: they organize drawn surfaces in a strangely
\nirregular, naive order.<\/p>\n
At the opening of his exhibition at the Four Seasons Resort,
\nIda Bagus Nyoman Rai was sitting silently in a corner smiling.
\nThe cocktail was on. But he was elsewhere. We can therefore
\nassume that, as he has done for decades with all the Tuan, his
\nfriends, he will go on as if there never was a party, as if he
\nnever had been recognized as a great living artist.<\/p>\n
Perhaps he does not even know that there are \"great artists\".
\nPerhaps he does not after all need electricity.<\/p>",
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