Stolen paintings reflect Kerton's career

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.