Word: artistics
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
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...
...work often cited as proof is So Was Born the Generation of '66. Painted in that year, it shows a young artist, in a red hip-length jacket, holding up a paintbrush like a peace offering amid a violent streetscape. In the background, graffiti from the Partai Komunis Indonesia (PKI) is scrawled across the walls. The painting's content is explicitly political. "[Sudjojono's] point is that all the artist needs is his paint and brush and he can take on the world," explains Kuala Lumpur gallery owner Valentine Willie. Putting the artist center stage also gave the work...
...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...