Word: affandi
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Approached country by country, the exhibition demonstrated not so much national characteristics as the internationalism of modern art. Except for Indonesia, which showed a roomful of brilliant portraits and figure studies by self-trained Affandi, none of the small nations contributed any startling talents. Only the U.S., Great Britain, France, Belgium and Italy offered artists of unmistakably major stature...
...exposition of ancient and modern Indonesian art, Affandi's 48 pictures are a curious combination of East and West. He paints anything that catches his eye-huge Western bridges, gritty red-light districts, stolid water buffaloes, dead chickens, his friends, his toilworn mother. And he paints them with obvious emotion: his lines are slapdash, his colors sometimes slop together in incoherence. But more often the result he gets is a soaring, faintly oriental fantasy...
...Affandi's father, a clerk on a Dutch sugar plantation, wanted him to be a doctor, lawyer or engineer. But Affandi had other ideas. In elementary school, he discovered that he could get a grade of nine out of ten in art class, made up his mind to be an artist, and for 20 years struggled for recognition. To eat, he taught school, collected tickets at a local movie house, tried house painting, saving the leftover paint for his canvases...
...Affandi never learned to use a palette, dislikes brushes. Instead, he squeezes paint on to his thumb, then smears it around the canvas. He will often spend a week studying a subject, but the actual painting seldom takes longer than 90 furious minutes. "After about an hour," he says, "I usually feel my emotions declining. It's better to stop then. The painting is finished...
...show last week, Affandi was still a little fidgety about all the attention he was getting. He had never been out of Java until three years ago, and in the next few months, he will travel to Paris. Rome, Stockholm and the U.S. with his paintings. When he gets home, he wants to start an art school for native painters, but first he wants to look around a bit and see what the Western world has been doing in art. "If I'd never left Java," he says, "I would never have seen where I stand as a painter...