'Affandi and Family' to display 100 paintings

By Parvathi Nayar Narayan

JAKARTA (JP): Among contemporary artistes, it is rare for a painter to be a household name -- that is a privilege usually reserved for movie stars and musicians. Affandi, however, is an exception, a name familiar to most Indonesians. His death in 1990 was widely mourned, even an exhibition was held posthumously at the Smithsonian Institute, Washington D.C. Since then, the next significant Affandi exhibition is arguably the one beginning in June 1996 at The Regent, Jakarta.

There have been many exhibitions of the Affandi family, but this will be the first one to bring together the paintings of Affandi, his wife Maryati and both his daughters Kartika and Rukmini.

Affandi was born in Cirebon in 1907. His artistic career seems almost more colorful than his paintings -- he began by painting billboards, sometimes even houses, in Bandung, but by the time he died in 1990, he was considered one of the most influential painters of modern Indonesian art. Affandi is remembered as an expressionist painter, who eschewed the use of brushes, painting instead with his fingers or squeezing the paint directly on to the canvas. The results were paintings created of dramatic, swirling swathes of paint and color.

Kartika Affandi, the artist's eldest daughter, has achieved recognition in her own right as one of Indonesia's important contemporary artists. She was taught by her father to paint in his special and distinctive style. It was somewhat in the nature of an experiment she says, for unlike her father she was not first tutored in the ways of classical art. However Affandi was not a rigid teacher, and kept emphasizing that she would discover her own mistakes from her own experience. Actually, the most interesting part of the press conference held to promote the upcoming Affandi and Family exhibition was a painting demonstration by Kartika Affandi. By hand gesture -- and spoken word -- she showed how similar her style was to Affandi's, but yet was different. And not just because she is left-handed, while her father was right-handed.

The subject she chose to paint was a mixed bouquet of flowers in whites, yellows, maroon and of course, green. First she coated the canvas with linseed oil to allow the paint -- applied straight from the tube very thickly or in thin transparent strokes with her fingers -- to be manipulated with greater ease on the surface of the canvas. The shapes of the flowers were translated by the expressive movement of her hands into vibrant strokes of paint. They conveyed something of the character of the woman herself, strong energetic and outspoken. Color mixing was done directly on the canvas too, sometimes by allowing the underpainting to mix with the freshly applied color. It was a frenzied process that produced a painting in about 20 minutes.

Kartika Affandi's finishing touch constituted of strong black outlines in acrylic paint, obtained from a special tube. This she said was her own addition to her father's technique. She says that in terms of "feel", her pictures are happier, lighter while her father's were darker, more dramatic. She further explains how their individual personalities determined the way the painting would shape up, even if the starting point was the same. She humorously illustrated this by an example of how a similar subject, a pig, was treated so differently by the two of them -- in Affandi's work it was from a man's perspective with dramatic, indeed sexual overtones; in her's it was a woman's perspective with a strong maternal accent.

Kartika Affandi is an artist who likes painting on the spot. Her favorite subjects are human beings and animals. She says that the forthcoming exhibition will also have a lot of landscapes and subjects that are easy to sell; "... the paintings for my kitchen," she smiles, that are more commercial and bring in money. She also does a lot of restoration work especially of her father's paintings, which are another source of revenue for her.

Part of the exhibit will also be a series of prints done by Affandi, using techniques that he mastered while visiting Helfi, his granddaughter, and her diplomat-journalist husband Dirix Urbain in Belgium. It was Urbain who arranged the opportunity for Affandi to study the various techniques of printmaking. Urbain's eyes light up with affection when talking about his grandfather-in-law, saying "...he (Affandi) was a wonderful human being, who painted not for beauty but for humanity".

Urbain explains that the prints consist of lithographs, etchings and serigraphs, all limited edition prints signed by Affandi. The subjects are as varied as self portraits, Indian street scenes and atmospheric Parisian cafes. Affandi drew his inspiration for the Indian work from the two years he spent in India (1949 to 1951), having received a scholarship from the government of India. Affandi traveled extensively in India, drawing and sketching, and many of the images even have explanatory notes jotted in the artist's hand. This was followed by an exhibition tour of European cities like London, Rome and Paris, the last providing the inspiration for the Parisian scenes. It was probably in this time that he also studied Van Gogh's work, whose influence is very visible in Affandi's whirling colors and compositions.

Urbain's warm sentiments about Affandi were echoed by his wife Helfi Dirix, both of whom had come from Yogyakarta to Jakarta for the press conference. Both she and her husband will also speak at the seminar on Affandi, planned to be held prior to the exhibition. Helfi herself is not a painter but a dancer, and has established the River Castle dance and cultural center in Yogyakarta. When she tried painting, she says, she found she was unable to express what she felt; her paintings were far removed from her real feelings. However when she turned to dancing, she found a satisfying unity of form, feeling and expression. She credits her mother for allowing her the space to grow, and for not forcing things upon her.

The exhibition will also have paintings and embroidery by Maryati Affandi, the late painter's wife, who passed away in 1991. During the last years of her life she was increasingly more interested in her embroidery works. About these, Affandi himself is quoted as saying, "My wife's embroideries are unique because while it is the hand of a grandmother, the result is that of a child's." The fourth artist in the upcoming show is Rukmini, who studied art with her father Affandi from 1982 to 1988, and later under the tutelage of Barli S., at the Rangga Gempol Studio. She has exhibited several times in Jakarta and Yogyakarta.

The exhibition will showcase around 100 works of the Affandi family; all the works will be for sale. Thus it promises to be of interest to both art lovers and investors; for the latter obviously, it is a chance to invest in Affandi art, while for the former it will be an opportunity to see under one roof the artist's work and influence, and the ways in which his styles have been utilized and interpreted by the painters closest to him, in his own family.

* The Seminar on Affandi will be at The Regent on June 18. Tickets at Rp 40,000 are available from The Regent Business Center.

*The exhibition Affandi and Family will be held at The Regent, Jakarta, from June 20 to July 7, 1996. Admission is free.