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Art, Architecture, Music
Balinese Painting:
From Religious Art to Post Modern Innovation
Prior to the 20th century, Balinese paintings were
primarily religious works, produced as offerings of beauty
and piety to please the gods and to illustrate an ancient
Balinese world view. They were made not for their abstract
artistic value, but to serve as teaching tools to spread
religious and cultural values to the population. Telling
stories from the ancient Indic epics the Mahabarata and the
Ramayana, these paintings copied the style of the wayang
kulit - the traditional shadow puppet play. Like the
leather wayang puppets upon which they were modelled,
these paintings portrayed stylized figures - popular folk
heroes and fearsome demons - in a flat, two-dimensional
style without the use of depth of field or perspective.
Unlike modern Western paintings where one or two central
figures dominate the field of vision and centrally organize
the composition, in Balinese traditional paintings series of
small figures filled each canvas, with each segment
depicting a particular scene from well known religious
stories. The traditional center for the production of these
paintings was the village of Kamasan, near Klungkung, where
fine examples of this ancient style can still be found
today.
The 20th century, however, brought, among other social
changes, an explosion of innovation in the Balinese arts,
especially painting, which began to transform both its style
and subject matter. Much of this new creative surge has been
attributed to the influence of expatriate Westerners who
came to Bali lured by tales of a land where art melded with
the everyday and where alternative visions of aesthetics and
experience could be explored. Most prominent among this
group of cultured travellers was the German artist Walter
Spies, who came to Bali in 1927, settling by the banks of
the Campuan River near Ubud, and the Dutch artist Rudolf
Bonnet, who moved to Ubud in 1931. The work of these two men
had a tremendous influence on the Balinese painters they
came in contact with. Spies’s dense, carefully drawn
landscapes and scenes of everyday village life prompted
local painters to introduce depth and perspective in their
works, and encouraged them to expand their thematic
repertoire to include realistic portrayals of their culture
along with the traditional religious subjects. Bonnet’s
work, which tended toward romantic portrayals of lithe young
bare-breasted Balinese maidens and handsome, virile Balinese
boys, inspired future generations of local artists to paint
idealized images of Balinese beauty, as well as to explore a
more naturalistic and detailed treatment of the human form.
Both of these artists also helped start a revolution in
Balinese painting by distributing modern materials to local
artists. Equipped with drawing paper and colored inks,
painters were able to achieve a precision of line and a
subtlety of shading never before possible. But perhaps the
greatest contribution of Spies and Bonnet to the development
of Balinese painting came when the two men enlisted the help
of a prince of Ubud’s royal family, Cokorda Gede Agung
Sukawati, in forming an association called Pita Maha, which
helped teach promising Balinese artists and promote their
work abroad. Although the association itself was short
lived, ending with the Second World War and the ensuing
fight for Indonesian independence, it provided the needed
catalyst to push the Balinese arts in exciting new
directions and to introduce their beauty and passion to an
admiring world audience.
During the Pita Maha period and in the post-War years
leading up to the advent of mass tourism in the 1970s,
Balinese painting began moving down bold new paths. It was,
however, still a “traditional” art form in many
important ways. Rather than articulating a Western obsession
with individuality of artistic expression and ownership of
ideas, Balinese painters of this period rarely signed their
names to their works, and they tended to follow schools of
painting based around recognizable village styles. The
painters of Ubud, who were most influenced by Spies, Bonnet
and the other Westerners who were turning a sleepy rural
village into an oasis for expatriate artists, tended to
paint secular portrayals of everyday Balinese life that
emphasized the realistic rendition of scenery and the
accuracy of anatomical forms. The painters of Batuan
village, another important center of painting, however,
worked in a more expressionist fashion, covering canvases
with dense, detailed portrayals of figures from traditional
culture and scenes from the unseen world of magic, sorcery
and imagination. And, beginning in the 1950s, another school
of painting, known as the Young Artists School, developed in
the village of Penestanan, near Ubud, where, with the help
of the Dutch painter turned Indonesian citizen Arie Smit,
young painters began using bright primary colors to depict
scenes of village festivals, birds and animals.
Today, Balinese painting encompasses a fantastic range of
styles, techniques and subject matter. One can still find wayang
style paintings executed with time honored ancient
techniques and exploring traditional subject matters, and
one can find postmodern masterpieces that experiment with
the medium of color and canvas to question the meaning of
tradition itself in the contemporary culture of Bali. One
can find commercialized copies of Western and Balinese
paintings done by kids looking to make a fast and easy buck,
and one can find truly exquisite attempts to forge new
perspectives by artists who have made painting their life’s
work, studying technique, art history and theory at the
influential state sponsored schools for the arts. One can
pick up a painted souvenir on the streets of Kuta for a few
dollars, or one can enter the hushed, elite realms of Bali’s
exclusive galleries, where Picassos are hung next to
brilliant new Balinese painters, making Bali a truly
international and cosmopolitan center for the arts. For the
lover of aesthetic expression, Bali is sure to charm, to
inspire, and to provoke introspection about the meaning and
marketing of art and culture in a globalizing world.
To learn more about Balinese paintings, you can first
browse through your closest bookstore for any of the
following titles:
Images of Power: Balinese Paintings Made for Gregory
Bateson and Margaret Mead. By Hildred Geertz. 1995,
University of Hawaii Press. This beautifully illustrated
book is an absolute must for anyone interested in Balinese
art and culture. Written by a Princeton University
anthropologist who is one of the foremost experts on
Balinese culture in the world today, it explores the
Balinese psyche and its obsession with the dark world of
sorcery and spiritual power through an in depth analysis of
a group of paintings made in Batuan village in the 1930s for
the famous anthropologists Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson.
Balinese Paintings. By A.A.M. Djelantik. 1990,
Oxford University Press Images of Asia Series. This book
provides an excellent, accessible overview of the history of
Balinese painting from pre-colonial times until the 1980s.
Indonesian Heritage Series, Volume Seven: Visual Art.
1998, Archipelago Books. For the art lover looking for a
truly comprehensive introduction to the fascinating and
diverse arts of the Indonesian archipelago, this lavishly
illustrated and impeccably researched text is certain to
satisfy. It includes a complete section on Balinese
paintings, from traditional works to modern experiments,
written by knowledgeable scholars in an easily readable
style.
Bhima Swarga: The Balinese Journey of the Soul. By
Idanna Pucci. 1985, Alfred Van der Mark Publishers. This
beautifully illustrated book is devoted to the traditional wayang
style paintings of Bali, which portray tales from the
ancient Hindu epics.
Perceptions of Paradise: Images of Bali in the Arts.
By Garret Kam. 1993, Ubud. This is a well researched, easy
to read overview of Balinese painting, with a special focus
on the outstanding collection of the Neka Museum in Ubud.
The Art of Bali: Reflection of Faith: The History of
Painting in Batuan 1834-1994. By Klaud D. Hohn. 1994,
Pictures Publishers. This book is an illustrated history of
painting in the village of Batuan, one of the most important
traditional centers of art on Bali. It offers not just a
glimpse into the fascinating visual world of Balinese
paintings, but provides biographies of the individual artist
as well.
For those who would rather immerse themselves in the
images themselves, an excellent introduction to Balinese
painting is available by taking a tour through the Puri
Lukisan (“Palace of Painting”) Museum in Ubud or the
Bali Museum in Denpasar. At these venerable institutions you
can follow the development of Balinese painting, viewing
masterpieces from different eras and schools of art. Armed
with this knowledge and appreciation, you are now ready to
browse through Bali’s famed art shops and galleries for
the perfect buy.
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