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.