Word: sudjojono
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...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's words was Hendra Gunawan, and in the early 1950s the admiring Hendra (who is better known simply...
...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...
...head of the party tried to prevent him from divorcing his first wife," says Rose today. But Sudjojono refused to comply, and in 1958 quit the PKI and his parliamentary post. He married Rose the following year. It was a painful decision, as his parliamentary salary disappeared, along with government patronage for his art. "We didn't have a lot of money," recalls Maya, who says most of the family's income came from her mother's piano lessons and singing (Rose was a mezzo-soprano who frequently performed on national radio...
...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...
...Given the scope of its ambition, "Strategies Towards the Real" is perhaps bound to falter in parts. To begin with, although the influence Sudjojono exerted over painters like Masriadi and Suwage is clear, it is less certain that he shaped the work of the more avant-garde artists in the show. (One thinks, in particular, of a Mantofani painting of a giant golf ball - shaped globe.) As the captions around the works are minimal, and the catalogue filled with opaque jargon, it is also frequently left to the viewer to connect the dots between Sudjojono's works, and between Sudjojono...