Word: artiste
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Despite the hardships under the Japanese, and the ensuing guerrilla war against the Dutch, the 1940s were considered a good time to be an artist. Clustered in Yogyakarta were painters eager to break with the Dutch school of painting in Indonesia, of which the preeminent exemplar was the Bali-based Rudolf Bonnet. The pastoral depictions of Indonesian village life produced by Bonnet and others were dismissed by Sudjojono as so much shallow Orientalism. "For my people, reality is the reality of rice," he wrote in 1950, arguing for a muscular realism. One of the painters who was moved by Sudjojono...
...Yogyakarta-based Suwage produced his own take, So Was Born the Generation of the Nineties. In the updated version, Sudjojono's fragile political optimism, stemming from the hope that the Sukarno-led left and Suharto-led right might reconcile, has given way to cynicism. The expression of the artist in Sudjojono's painting is serene; in Suwage's, it is aloof. Gone are the cerulean sky, the chaotic melee of betjak drivers and army lorries, and any other form of life except for the artist, who is stripped of the mobility of Sudjojono's figure and stands pickled in stiff...
...Born in Sumatra, Sudjojono went to school in Bandung. According to his daughter Maya, he trained for several years under a Japanese artist, who was likely an officer in the World War II army of occupation. Otherwise he earned a precarious living through school teaching...
...Married by this time, Sudjojono was beginning to enjoy modest success both as an artist and as a communist politician. In the early 1950s, he went on a government-sponsored tour to Europe, where, in Amsterdam, he met a beautiful Eurasian music student of German-Indonesian origin named Rose Pandanwangi. She too was married, but upon her return to Indonesia they began an affair. In 1955, Sudjojono was elected to Indonesia's first parliament under the banner of the PKI, which had become part of a shaky coalition cobbled together by President Sukarno. A few years later, Sudjojono disclosed...
...under Suharto, however, that Sudjojono began to blossom as an artist. Unencumbered by the constraints of socialist realism, he began to experiment with Pop Art and Expressionistic techniques. In a time of dictatorship, it was perhaps just as well. "The Suharto era made it impossible for political thought to be rendered in art," says Ahmad Mashadi, head of the Museum of the National University of Singapore Centre for the Arts. In fact, by quitting LEKRA early, Sudjojono escaped the punishment that Suharto was to mete out to leftist artists, and became the most prominent figure of what Kwok calls...