Walter Spies letters emerge at Christie's auction in Amsterdam

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.