Ida Bagus Nyoman Rai: Bali's forgotten maestro

By Jean Couteau

SANUR, Bali (JP): It is not often that one gets in Bali the opportunity to see a retrospective of the works of a great local "traditional" artist. Because Balinese paintings are painstakingly detailed, relatively few are produced by any single artist and, once they are, it is to be sold abroad.

This is why the present exhibition at the Four Seasons Resort is not to be missed. The artist, Ida Bagus Nyoman Rai, 90, is arguably the most important surviving artist of the pre-war generation, that which saw the burgeoning of the "Balinese Pita Maha Renaissance". And, by a whim of fate, many of his works have remained in the country, either in private collections or in those of the Ratna Warta, Neka and Arma museums.

Identified and gathered by Ambar, the curator of the Ganesha Gallery, they are now being exhibited for a month from Nov. 8, accompanied by an illustrated catalog on the Sanur School by Bruce Carpenter. Both the exhibition and the catalog were made possible with the support of The Jakarta Post.

Knowing this, and coming at a time when Christie's is selling Balinese "traditional" paintings at ever higher prices in Singapore, who would guess that the artist rewarded by this exhibition, Ida Bagus Nyoman Rai, whose works illustrate among other things Claire Holt's Art in Indonesia, would still be living, ignored, and one of the poorest citizens of Sanur, the richest tourist resort on the island.

When I visited him a few months ago, ahead of this exhibition, I expected to see if not luxury, at least a semblance of comfort, of the kind one sees among the new Balinese middle-class: a large gate, to show his brahminhood, a ceramic floor, a TV set and a flock of noisy grandchildren in the background.

What I found instead was a rundown wooden shack, without even electricity, in the outer yard of a brahmin's compound. Our star painter had been completely bypassed by the prosperity enjoyed by most of his peers.

Then I saw the man himself. I was expecting an "artist", someone eager to talk about himself and his works -- aren't all Balinese, these days, especially talkative on their role as "artists"? What I found instead was a humble, smiling old man, who spoke no Indonesian and lived not only without children but even without a woman to look after him.

"I never had one," he told me in high-Balinese, grinning.

I smiled in return. Images of his paintings were coming to my mind -- a youth pinching a woman's nipple, another snaring the penis of a friend -- and only then did I realize the truth. Ida Bagus Nyoman Rai was this rare jewel of an artist: an authentic "naive" artist, naive even within the framework of Balinese painting.

Ida Bagus Nyoman Rai is indirectly related to the pre-war Sanur School of painting, which survived until the seventies. Unlike the Padangtegal and Batuan schools, in which Walter Spies and Rudolf Bonnet transformed the Balinese "system of form" by introducing depth and pseudo-anatomy, the school of Sanur shows little direct influence by Western artists. It grew instead out of a commercial endeavor, that of the Neuhaus brothers.

Arriving in Bali in the late 1930s, the Neuhaus brothers built the Sanur Aquarium to which they soon added a gallery. But they needed to fill the latter. So they went on the hunt for talents, distributing paper and materials to their local acquaintances. The results were stunning. Instead of the filled canvasses of the hinterland schools, the locals were producing airy, black and white works, where the sea played a prominent role. This became the Sanur School.

Ida Bagus Nyoman Rai was never formally part of the Neuhaus team of painters, although he sold his works at the aquarium too. But he was well-introduced into the Western expatriate milieu. He worked as the house boy of Theo Meier, a Swiss and another pre- war artist of Bali. It was the latter who provided him with his materials and with encouragement. Carpenter says that the artist's drawings were then "full of spontaneous naivety (and) humor, (with) and almost surreal sense of proportion and perspective", and that he may have been indirectly influenced by Theo Meier.

He spent with him the war years. Later he became closely associated with the reputed Australian artist Donald Friend, who owned a "palace" by the beach and surrounded himself with a court of handsome Balinese ephebes. Although no ephebe himself, Ida Bagus Nyoman Rai would go there to paint on call for the weird "master". His hand can be seen on some of Friend's works. After Donald Friend's departure and, until recently, he was employed as a gardener at the Tanjung Sari hotel, whose owner is also one of his most faithful collectors.

When one questions Ida Bagus Nyoman Rai on these "friends" of the past, all of whom were directly or indirectly related to the art world and its market, what is striking is how little impression they have left on him. He talks about Tuan Be (Mr. Fish) -- one of the Neuhaus brothers -- Tuan Tio, Tuan Tonal and others. All, to him, were obviously Tuan or "Masters", thus part of an alien, Western world, and with whom there was little communication beside exchange of services and transactions -- at a minimum price.

One can now easily guess that the Tuan were as keen and dominant as the Balinese was naive and submissive. Even when it was "productive" the history of the encounter of the two parties was, unavoidably, that of colonial and/or social inequality. Slanted from the start.

When Donald Friend allowed Ida Bagus Nyoman Rai to paint areas of his canvases with waves and Balinese motifs, it was always on his own terms, never on those of Ida Bagus Nyoman Rai's.

Ida Bagus Nyoman Rai, though, never questioned his predicament. He was never, as an artist, the witness of what he thought, but rather of what he felt. His works have all the savor of immediacy and outspokenness. Adolescent games, the presence of the sea, courting, procreation, massaging, he tells the world as it is to him, without any filtering. When he draws a youth snaring his friend's penis, he is not discoursing, as Donald Friend would have it, on homosexuality, but simply depicting, with a naive humor, a play common among Balinese youth.

His technique is no less direct: the surfaces are flat, with the characters drawn as he perceives them -- some overly large and others too small -- rather than as they are "objectively". One of his drawings has for example a whale occupying most of the canvas. The stranded animal was such an event that, to him, everything else shrunk by comparison.

Whatever the theme, though, the artist's eye is ever present. When he depicts human figures larger than nature -- in Rajapala, for example -- it is also because they are elements of his compositions: they organize drawn surfaces in a strangely irregular, naive order.

At the opening of his exhibition at the Four Seasons Resort, Ida Bagus Nyoman Rai was sitting silently in a corner smiling. The cocktail was on. But he was elsewhere. We can therefore assume that, as he has done for decades with all the Tuan, his friends, he will go on as if there never was a party, as if he never had been recognized as a great living artist.

Perhaps he does not even know that there are "great artists". Perhaps he does not after all need electricity.