Walter Spies letters emerge at Christie's auction in Amsterdam

By Amir Sidharta

JAKARTA (JP): Twenty Walter Spies' letters, hitherto unknown, emerged in the most recent Christie's Amsterdam auction of Indonesian pictures, watercolors and drawings.

The letters were addressed to Carl and Olive Gotsch.

Carl Gotsch was apparently the director of music at the Keraton (palace) Yogyakarta. When Spies arrived in Java in 1923, he took a job as a piano player in a cinema. Later, Gotsch hired Spies as a piano player in his ensemble. Spies moved to Bali in 1927, but apparently maintained contact with the Gotsches through this correspondence.

It is interesting to note that there is no mention of the Gotsches in Hans Rhodius and John Darling's Walter Spies and Balinese Art (Terra, Zutphen, 1980).

The letters, which date from June 17, 1928 to Feb. 18, 1940, are sure to give further insight into Spies' life and artistic work.

In one letter, Spies mentioned his interest in the biological study of spiders and dragonflies.

The artist also explained his struggle to complete an illustration for a book on Indonesian cultural history by Stutterheim in his Sept. 9, 1929 letter. In the same letter, he related his trip with Dutch artist Rudolf Bonnet to a temple in Bali.

In a letter dated June 17, 1928, Spies conveyed his intention to visit Yogyakarta in a car, which he had obtained in exchange for two paintings, with Victor Baron von Plessen. One of the two paintings was sold in Christie's March 1997 sale, for a hammer price of S$750,000.

Another letter, dated 1939 in Buitenzorg (Bogor), described a traveling exhibition of Spies' paintings which visited Batavia, Bogor, Bandung, Semarang and Surabaya.

The letters also provide an insight into Spies' social and personal life. Many of them mention visits to Bali of various interesting personalities, including historians Dr. Stutterheim and Claire Holt, actress Barbara Hutton, filmmaker Victor Baron von Plessen, anthropologist Jane MacPhee (Jane Belo) and novelist Vicki Baum. Strangely, the letters do not mention Charlie Chaplin, Noel Coward, Margaret Mead, Miguel and Rose Covarrubias who were also known to have visited Spies in Bali.

It is possible that the letters were not the entire correspondence between Spies and the Gotsches. There is clearly a gap in correspondence between January 1930 and September 1933 and again between November 1936 to February 1938. The first gap was perhaps a difficult period in the artist's life. Spies' mentor, filmmaker Murnau, was killed in a tragic accident on his way to attend the premiere of his latest film in Hollywood. In 1932, his favorite cousin Conrad was attacked by a shark at Lebih, South of Gianyar, and died of injuries. Not much of Spies' life in 1937 is known, except that he retreated to the mountains at Iseh, Karang Asem, for a significant period of time.

In his letters, Spies also spoke of his plan to establish an aquarium in Sanur. But perhaps the most interesting letter is the one that documents the progress of the building of Spies' house. This four-page letter of January 1930 includes simple sketches of his Campuan house. "Because the whole thing stands, has a roof -- all sorts of magnificent carvings on pillars and 'balks' and windows and doors. Some of the walls stand alright. You know I am very crazy -- but I want to have a bridge from the mountaigne into my roof. It looks like that: very stupid on this sketch," he wrote.

Spies' accomplishments in music and dance are also evidenced through the letters. He conveyed that he had coauthored, with Beryl de Zoete, the book, Dance and Drama in Bali.

In his letter dated Jan. 21, 1939, written following his arrest on New Year's Eve, Spies sounded optimistic. "Even some pauses seem necessary sometime. But anyhow, everything in life is to the good! And there is nothing, never that one didn't deserve! Often moments in life seem senseless and wasted -- but they are there and they seem to be breaks or stops -- and always they are steps to new starts, with new perspectives." Spies' biographers Rhodius and Darling did not clearly state was he was charged with, but suggest that it had something to do with statutory rape and homosexuality.

Reincarnation

In a letter signed June 22, 1939, written during his internment in Surabaya, Spies mentioned the completion of his most recent painting. He detailed a thorough description of what has been recognized as Scherzo for Brass Orchestra, a surrealistic piece which shows the repetition of a creature with a dog or deer-like body with a human head, perhaps even a kind of self-portrait of the artist himself, dotting a landscape filled with tropical plants. Apparently, Spies considered the experience of accomplishing this painting as a reincarnation. He said, in explaining the painting, "everything seems to have settled inside me and wants to come out in a hundred ways which look unlimited".

In this letter he also remarked on two other paintings, Morning Light (1938) which is in the Sukarno collection, and The Landscape with Her Children, which was sold in Christie's Singapore auction in 1995 for S$850,000.

The significance of Spies' letters, in particular, seem to be the mention of his internment between December 1938 and August 1939. Spies did not relate the fact of his imprisonment even in his letters to his mother, which serve as a primary source of Rhodius' biography on the artist, Walter Spies, Schonheit und Reichtum des Lebens (The Hague, 1964).

Certainly the letters illustrate the long lasting relationship between Walter Spies and the Gotsch couple. They cover the artist's early life in Bali until just before his final internment by the Dutch, following Germany's invasion of Holland in May 1940. Just before Japan's invasion of the Indies, the ship Van Imhoff which evacuated German prisoners, including Spies, to India was bombed by the Japanese. The artist did not survive the attack.

Since Indonesia's art boom, interest in Walter Spies has increased tremendously. The appearance of the letters in the recent sale will certainly be an important addition to the scholarship of an artist whose life has proved to be tremendously influential toward creative and artistic life in Indonesia's past.

The Walter Spies letters failed to sell at last month's auction in Amsterdam. This was predictable as the most prospective buyers, mostly from Indonesia, have been affected by the economic crisis. Although Spies' paintings are considered highly collectible items, the letters do not appeal to the average collector. These letters would appeal to museums or foundations. However, at an estimated price of US$7,000 for the items, most Indonesian museums and foundations would consider this a luxury beyond their means.

The writer is curator at Museum Universitas Pelita Harapan, Tangerang, West Java.