Stolen paintings reflect Kerton's career

By Amir Sidharta

JAKARTA (JP): The 19 Sudjana Kerton paintings that were recently stolen in Bandung reflected many stages in the artists's career, primarily from 1950 to 1988, with two works left undated.

Kerton was born in Bandung in 1922. Between 1944 and 1949 he worked as an artist for the Patriot newspaper in Yogyakarta. He also participated in the Indonesian independence movements as an artist, making documentary sketches of several events related to the country's struggle for independence. During this period he actively participated in several art exhibitions in Yogyakarta. He developed a style which was still very much rooted in realism. In a recent exhibition the paintings from this period were mostly portraits dating from 1949.

In 1950 he became one of the first Indonesian artists to receive a scholarship from the Foundation for Cultural Exchange to study in Amsterdam and Paris.

Five of the stolen paintings, namely Daumier's Studio, Sheep Meadow, Man from Suriname, Village in the Valley, Pontoise and Apple Tree date from 1950. During this period, Kerton's work was still very much akin to his painting style before he left Indonesia. Man from Suriname, for example, is treated in very much the same manner as his portraits of 1949, although perhaps slightly less refined. Even the treatment of interiors in his painting of Daumier's Studio shows a similarity in spirit to the interiors of his 1949 portraits of Nike and Woman with Cat.

A year later he received a scholarship to study at the Art Students League in New York. He continued to live in New York for the next 25 years.

There he used abstractions influenced by cubism. He reduced figures into facets and planes of color. Nonetheless, as Cockfight (1958) and Rainstorm (1958) show, Kerton often painted Indonesian subjects even though he did not produce them in Indonesia. The paintings became a means to express his nostalgia for his motherland.

Later, his paintings looked more and more like facets of color. The figure in Sleeping Nude (1959) almost disappears among the shapes and colors on the canvas.

In 1962, renowned Indonesian painter Affandi, who was an old friend of Kerton's, visited him in New York. Upon seeing a portrait of Affandi eating a watermelon in the collection of the Museum Universitas Pelita Harapan, Jakarta, Mrs. Louise Kerton, the widow of Sudjana Kerton, said that she remembered the summer day when the two artists bought lobsters and watermelon. They had a picnic and painted together. "Affandi painted his own image, and Sudjana painted Affandi," she recalled. Kerton's painting of Affandi, also produced that very summer day, is Affandi Eating Watermelon. It was also stolen on the night of Feb. 2.

Later that year, Kerton followed Affandi, who had gone to Mexico. There they painted together. Kerton stayed on in Mexico for about a year to study mural-painting. The Fallen Matador (1963), another missing painting, is from this brief stay in Mexico. Here his cubistic approach is given a bright Mexican palette.

Kerton returned to Bandung in 1976 and built his studio at Bukit Pakar, Dago Atas, which he called Sanggar Luhur (Illustrious Studio). Upon his return to Bandung, he expressed great interest and concern about village life. Buffalo and Bird (1980), symbolizes the artist's great respect for a mutually beneficial symbiosis within the ecology. The cubistic elements of his American period are no longer treated as planes of color but rather facets of natural elements, particularly earth and water.

In Bandung, Kerton viewed life with great cynicism, thereby managing to highlight certain interesting aspects of life which are often overlooked and taken for granted by the general public. Here he adopted yet another style of painting. Although it clearly derives from the American period, his paintings after 1978 seem to have a strong element of caricature.

He expresses his impressions of riding an oplet (small bus) and all of its intricacies in Anatomy of an Oplet (1979), another work which was stolen. He stresses the chaotic atmosphere in the oplet, with one passenger's feet being tangled with another passenger's feet. Meanwhile, the driver has to pay attention to everything that is happening around the car, including the man who is filling up the gas tank of the vehicle, the view of the traffic as seen through the windshield and his own appearance as reflected through the rear view mirror.

In Street Circus (1988), also a missing work, Kerton portrays children being amused by a monkey, who takes the role of a woman looking at her own image in the mirror, while a dog stands on its two hind feet wearing a dress and carrying a purse attached to her umbrella. The animals are being directed by a man, while his assistant and another monkey watches. Certainly this painting is not a mere rendition of the street scene, but rather a commentary about the social condition of life in Indonesia in the 1980s.

Back in Indonesia, his paintings no longer reflected his longing for a distant land, but perhaps they still do show his concern about preserving a disappearing village life. Lion Dance (1984) shows the painter's attention and love for the folk arts in his home country.

After a long illness, Kerton passed away in 1994.

Critics

Kerton is still not very well known and is only beginning to be properly placed in the history of Indonesian Art. Upon hearing the news about the theft, Sudarmaji, a critic, mentioned in a Kompas morning daily that the 1996 exhibition of Kerton's work was the first show of the painter's work in Indonesia.

Actually, Kerton had had four solo exhibitions in Jakarta before his death in 1994, the first at the Taman Ismail Marzuki (TIM) in 1980, then at Balai Budaya in 1984, again at TIM in 1985 and finally at the Erasmus Huis in 1988. In fact, the critic was curator of Kerton's 1985 exhibition.

It is true that the 1996 retrospective was the first exhibition of Kerton's work after the Indonesian art boom, which started in 1989. The exposure that the 1996 show received opened many eyes to the value of Kerton's paintings. The theft of his works on Feb. 2 was the largest robbery of works of a single artist in one incident.

Another critic Jim Supangkat mentioned in Suara Pembaruan afternoon daily that the theft was premature. He said that critics have only just reached a discussion about Kerton's existence and position on the map of Indonesian art. Through this statement, he admits that critics are lagging behind art criminals in their knowledge and assessment of works of art, especially with regard to their commercial value. Even before the 1996 retrospective, a number of Kerton fakes appeared on the market, indicating that there was a great demand for the artist's work.

Although the theft is clearly the work of professionals, it seems to be linked to clandestine art dealers, who are developing a sound knowledge about paintings in this booming market. The Indonesian art market is tight-knit and it is likely that the paintings were meant to be shipped somewhere where the art market is not as nationalistic, such as Singapore, Malaysia or Hong Kong.