Around 3,000 foreign artists paint Indonesia
Around 3,000 foreign artists paint Indonesia
By Amir Sidharta
JAKARTA (JP): More than thirty years ago, in 1964, a five- volume album titled Paintings and Statues from the Collection of President Soekarno of the Republic of Indonesia was published. Since then, the publication set the standards of collecting art in Indonesia. Although many collectors had already been collecting artwork by artists included in the volumes, the publication of the album placed the names of both Indonesian and foreign artists on the map of Indonesian art.
It seems that we owe our familiarity with the works of certain foreign painters such as Dake, Dezentje, Dooyewaard, Hofker, Le Mayeur, Meier, Sonnega, Spies, and Strasser to the Soekarno Collection. But, actually the artists mentioned above are only a handful of the many foreign artists who painted Indonesia.
During the three-and-a-half centuries of colonial rule, Indonesia was the subject matter of many more foreign artists. Approximately how many artists did paint Indonesia? No one could even make a rough guess. Recently published, the Lexicon of Foreign Artists who Visualized Indonesia (1600-1950) includes an incredible number of almost 3,000! That figure suggests an average of 8.57 artists a year.
The authors of this impressive 528-page volume, Leo Haks and Guus Maris, are veteran art dealers specializing in paintings, drawings, prints, and books on Indonesia. They were frustrated with the fact that only a very limited amount of background information and historical data is available about the artifacts they were trading.
Therefore, they decided to undertake the compilation of a lexicon of artists connected with Indonesia. The research for this volume took 11 years. The books, articles and archives of the late Mrs. J. de Loos-Haazman, who had done three years of initial research to compile the data of artists working in Indonesia, formed a source of basic information upon which the authors could elaborate.
Research for the Lexicon utilized newspapers, magazines, books and first-hand research. A substantial amount of biographical data also came from P.A. Scheen's lexicons of Dutch artists.
What has been created by foreign artists in Indonesia spans the gamut of artforms. Hence, the researchers had to consult experts on prints, illustration, posters, as well as specialists in the fields of anthropology, botany, history, zoology and the like. The visual research included having to consult several references, books and literature found in archives and libraries, including artist's libraries, John Bastin and Bea Brommer's. However, the author acknowledged Didier Hamel, "whose ceaseless enthusiasm and energy in promoting late 19th and 20th century Indonesian paintings" as their main source of inspiration.
In 1990, when Didier Hamel of the Duta Fine Arts Foundation in Jakarta was working on an acquisition of a representative collection of Indonesian paintings, he started a project to compile names of relevant artists. Haks and Maris volunteered to assist Hamel by way of collecting material from Dutch archives. However, it was soon evident that their approach differed from Hamel's. Hence the authors continued the book according to their own interests.
The book starts with the lexicon -- basically an alphabetical listing of the artists. It is followed by a "gallery" -- an album of black and white and color plates in two separate sections, each chronologically arranged. The book ends with notes and lists of the art works included in the "gallery"
As many as 200 of the 800 illustrations in the book have never been published before. Some, particularly the 17th and 18th century prints and paintings, have rarely been seen previously.
Although the title shows c. 1600 A.D. as the starting point for this publication, the earliest entry in the book is an engraving by G. Keller entitled A View of Banten, Java, dated 1597. The beginning of the illustrated section consists of numerous maps and views of important ports such as Batavia, Cirebon, Makassar, Ambon and so forth. Later, renderings of the natural environment and archaeological sites, studies of nature, and panoramas of man-made environments seemed to become more popular.
For the most part, the Lexicon remains faithful to the terms the authors defined so carefully in the introduction of the book. The authors clarify that they limited the book to include only those who visualized at least one aspect of Indonesia which can be recognized. Albeit interesting, the inclusion of Gauguin in the book is a little farfetched. The artist never really depicted Indonesia, although his portrait of Annah la Javanaise seems to confirm his rumored involvement with a Javanese woman, whom he met in Paris.
By contrast, the inclusion of Emil Nolde seems more appropriate, as it offers little known facts about the artists' time in the region. Nolde, one of the most important German impressionists, made a voyage to the Far East, visiting Java, Maluku, Sulawesi and Irian Jaya in 1913. The drawings, watercolors and sculptures created as a result of this trip were later published in his Welt und Heimat, Die Suedseereise 1913- 1918.
The book certainly deserves commendation because it goes well beyond covering the painters with whom most of us are already familiar. We learn more of Payen, Salm and the studio of Winckelman und Soehne who worked in the nineteenth century, as well as of Calmeijer, Carsten, Israelis, Muhlenfeld and von Pedersen among those who worked in the early twentieth century. However, as a good number of Spies' works was done in Indonesia, it is rather disappointing that not all of the paintings by Spies are of the artist's depiction of the country. One shows a winter image, most probably a scene in Russia. Since the book is supposed to be about visualization of Indonesia we would expect that the images included would be chosen accordingly.
Even the inclusion of sculptures which I initially found rather disturbing is actually a handsome addition to the volume. Many of the statues reproduced were found in the Netherlands, for example J. Mendes da Costa's Insulinde on the facade of a building in Amsterdam, van Lunteren's market scene at the Rijksbureau voor Kunshistorische Documentatie, The Hague, Vos' Javanese Dancer at the Central Library, Royal Tropical Institute, Amsterdam, and even Kruse's statue of a Balinese dancer exhibited at New York's World Fair 1939. Unfortunately, the note about J.C. Schultsz's genre reliefs of the colonial plantations only provides information about where the images have been reproduced, without mentioning of the current whereabouts of the works today.
The Lexicon also includes van den Eijnde, the artist who made, in cooperation with renowned Dutch architect W.M. Dudok, a monument of Gen. Van Heutz in Gondangdia in 1933-34. The entry mentions that the monument "was ground into gravel, to serve as a sports track in the Sukarno era." Today, the monument has been replaced by another monument built in the late 1970s.
It seems that research in this field is very much still in a preliminary stage. Perhaps, with a little more research, a few more sculptors could have been included. One that was not included is the artist who created the sculptures of Indonesian people now standing at Chicago's Field Museum.
Personally, I think that the book should have concentrated on two-dimensional art such as caricatures, posters and bookcovers which are trendy collectibles nowadays. O. Fabres' caricatures, done in the early days of tourism, present a satirical view on the emerging industry. The collection of posters in the book shows the level of sophistication evident in graphic design even in a region as remote as the Netherlands Indies.
The use of 1950 as the end of the interpretive scope has also been criticized by some observers. They see the authors as having followed the Dutch recognition of Indonesian independence on Dec. 27, 1949, after the Round Table Conference in The Hague instead of the Indonesian date of Aug. 17, 1945. Nonetheless, the reason for this date seems to be more of a pragmatical consideration devoid of any political intentions. The authors clearly wanted to include such interesting work as the renderings of S. Hartz for the banknotes of Bank Indonesia issued in 1951 and H.G. Smelt's renderings of indigenous architecture for Indonesian stamps issued in 1949-1950.
Leo Haks noted that they were careful to be neutral in terms of politics. Hence, the authors stayed away from offering their opinions. There is no mention of artistic quality or monetary values in the book so that people can make up their own mind in judging artwork. They said that tastes change, what is considered "out" in the past may be "in" today. As the project was done independently without any sponsorship, an approach that can be deemed relatively was taken.
Therefore, the book cover, which contains Imandt's painting of a beringin (banyan) tree, should not bee seen as an attempt to make the book seem politically correct. The authors wanted an image that would be attractive and represents Indonesia, not just Java and Bali.
"The beringin tree is common to Indonesia, seen throughout the archipelago, from Aceh to Maluku," said Haks, adding that "it is also considered sacred by many cultures in Indonesia." Furthermore, the tree's large canopy provides a protective shelter and symbolizes Indonesian unity. It also happens to be the symbol of the ruling Golkar group.
This grand ouvre of Haks and Maris is so comprehensive that it is unlikely that any other author will be able to even come close to what they have achieved. Although the authors claim impartiality, it seems inevitable that this Lexicon will set the standard for collectors in the next 30 years, at least through the first quarter of the next century.
While the epilogue admits that there is still much room for improvement, there is no doubt that this "first complete systematic reference work of foreign artists who visualized Indonesia" will also be the foremost publication in the field of art about Indonesia.