Modernity harms Batuan school of painting

Modernity harms Batuan school of painting

By Jean Couteau

DENPASAR (JP): Among the schools of Balinese painting, the
school of Batuan is renowned for its quality and creativity, the
legacy of a long court tradition and of more recent modern
changes.

In the 1920s, the village of Batuan came under the influence
of two western artists who had settled in Ubud under the
patronage of the Sukawati. Walter Spies and Rudolf Bonnet brought
new materials and opened new markets to the local artists,
setting off the Pitamaha renewal of the 1930s. Yet the 10
kilometers between the two villages kept Batuan artists free from
much of the formal stylistic influence that pervaded Ubud, where
Bonnet's "anatomism" left deep traces.

The quality of the Batuan school in these years rests on a
rich, dense use of Chinese ink in washes, layered to create an
atmosphere of dark shades off white highlights. The themes were
also renewed, with paintings depicting Balinese daily life or the
strange ghosts and spirits haunting the people's psyche.

After its heyday in the 1930s, the school of Batuan bloomed
again in the late 1960s. This resurgence was spurred in part by
the renewed wave of tourism after the New Order government took
power in 1965. In 1968, the master Jatasura's apprentices began
to compete among themselves to see who could produce the most
intricate paintings. There was Rajin, Jatasura's son, his cousins
Murtika and Tubuh and a few others. The impressive combination of
their talent soon led to the burgeoning of a new school of
exquisite wash miniatures on paper. This Chinese ink technique
was similar to that of preceding artists, but the drawing was
finer and a layer of color was added to the Chinese ink. The
themes were mainly borrowed from traditional stories and myths
from the wayang kulit puppet show.

The new school, encouraged by a few enlightened collectors and
tourists, was an immediate success. In response, most local
painters shifted to painting miniatures. Soon, hundreds of young
boys from Batuan and neighboring villages were lining up to
become masters' apprentices. Originally an artistic phenomenon,
the miniature style became a social phenomenon.

Arguably, the best traditional Balinese painters of the 1970s
and early 1980s came from Batuan. Sundra, Dewa Putu Kantor,
Taweng Bendi, Mandra, Bukel, Warsika, and Kamar are just a few of
their names. During this time, the price of a Batuan miniature
reached several thousands dollars on the international market.
Exquisite and beautifully colored, with a rich narrative and
sometimes imaginative composition, the miniatures of Batuan were
accepted as objets d'art.

In spite of its past success, the Batuan school appears to be
waning both in quantity and quality. On the quantitative level,
ignoring the work of some masters, artists have shifted
directions or are simply painting less. Sundra, a secondary
school teacher, is now more involved in his administrative duties
as a klian (headman) than in painting. Pera, Murtika's best
disciple, has now shifted his focus and works for a Japanese
graphic design company. Warsika has become a traditional
architect. Now, with the exception of the oldest and most
established artists, very few painters are still full-time
miniaturists.

There are many reasons for their decline. Paramount is the
fact that the painters cannot sell their work at a price that
reflects the time and labor spent on it. Most tourists buy
paintings as exotic curios rather than objets d'art, and dealers
pay the artists accordingly. Moreover, the miniaturists paint
themes and have a conception of space that is alien to the
tourists' expectations. Intricate works of gods and giants are
less salable than paintings of the idyllic Bali, with its garden-
of-heaven landscapes and bare-breasted women. Good miniatures
take months to complete while a salable landscape can normally be
completed in a few days. Good miniatures don't normally fetch a
better price than poor paintings with more attractive themes.

If they don't leave the field altogether, the painters tend to
accelerate the rhythm of their production at the expense of
quality. In the last 10 years, the miniatures, including that of
masters, have grown bigger -- the characters and other elements
are drawn on a larger scale -- and the intricacy is therefore
lost.

Themes have changed too. Birds and scenes of daily life have
slowly superseded the traditional mythological focus. To produce
faster, more and more painters have encouraged their apprentices
to copy photographs of earlier miniatures or photocopied
drawings. A large number of junk miniatures have therefore
appeared. This depresses the price and quality of the works
further.

Miniatures, like other schools of Balinese painting, have also
suffered from outside competition. Bali's galleries are now full
of paintings made by non-Balinese Indonesians who sell their own
ideas of idyllic Bali to credulous tourists who mistake the works
to be genuinely Balinese. Their representation of the island
appeals to tourists, but these painters don't use the painstaking
techniques of the Balinese. Their work is cheaper because the
price is based on work hours, not skill.

Under these conditions, it is no surprise that the Balinese,
in particular the miniaturists, are losing their grasp on the
definition of the image of Bali.

The ultimate reason for the decline of miniatures is cultural.
The mentality of the Balinese is changing. The artists of Batuan
were still raised and shaped by the images and narrative world of
the puppet show until the 1970s. It was this world which they
naturally represented in their works. But television has now
taken over the task of shaping the Balinese psyche. Their visual
memory is now bereft of the gods and demons who used to haunt
them.