Pura Kembarn, Sanur signed and titled 'S.Sudjojono/Pura Kembarn, Sanur' (lower right); signed again with monogram and dated 'BALI/1972' (upper left) oil on canvas 40 1/8 x 31 7/8 in. (102 x 81 cm.)
Acquired from Uit net werk van Sudjojono, Hotel Des Indes, The Netherlands, 1973. Anonymous sale, Christie's, Singapore 28 September 1997, lot 155. Acquired from the above sale by the present owner.
Notes
"Sudjojono saw that within the feudal community a nobleman held more value than a carriage driver or a vegetable seller due to social conventions: feudalism established a vertical distance between human beings. Heroic events were considered to be of more value than the buying and selling of vegetables in the market place due to social conventions. And animals such as bulls and lions were viewed as having a higher value than goats.
Sudjojono rejected this hierarchy of reality and convention. Painters, according to Sudjojono, must only resort to their own souls. To him painting was the visualization of the soul. Painters must be free of conventional standards, tradition, and the conventional grouping of people. The soul of a painter visible in a painting is what gives value to that painting. In this way painters could truly paint anything and bring forth works of quality as long as they guarded the quality of the soul." (Jim Supangkat, "The Emergence of Indonesian Modern Art" in Indonesian Modern Art and Beyond, The Indonesian Fine Arts Foundation, Jakarta, 1997, p. 38).
Jim Supangkat sums up the belief of S. Sudjojono very well. As the main exponent of Indonesian Modernism, the artist advocates the rejection of the Mooie Indie's (Beautiful Indonesia) aesthetics of romanticizing the land and the people. The eloquent artist very much provides the theoretical framework to the movement:
"there is one factor which I consider major. That is the factor of the populace. Even though I hate the society we have now, I love the populace, the people. My people are a people who can understand imagination, but when their wives and children are hungry, they will resort to theft." (Ibid, p. 39).
The raw and real facts of true living in his country. These are the subjects that interest Sudjojono and the other modernist artists and with which they remained steadfast throughout their career.
VARIOUS PROPERTIES
S. Sudjojono (Indonesia 1914-1986) is an undeniable leading figure of the Indonesian Modernist movement in Art. Known for his eloquent expounding of the movement's artistic principles, much of the movement's quotable rhetoric originated from the artist who famously declared "there is one factor which I consider major. That is the factor of the populace. Even though I hate the society we have now, I love the populace, the people. My people is a people who can understand only the simplest of realities. Their reality is the reality of rice." ("Soedjojono tentang Seodjojono", Mimbar Indonesia, August 19, 1950) Thence christening the expounders of the Modernist movement as the artists of the people, amongst whom, Affandi (Indonesia 1907-1990), Hendra (Indonesia 1918-1983) and Sudjojono himself became fondly regarded as the most passionate as well as most accomplished of the group.
Sudjojono's rhetoric such as "the hierarchy of reality and convention" would be the core of the discourse of Indonesian modernism, a movement that was initiated by its proponents' disgust for the School of Mooie Indie (Beautiful Indonesia). From the turn of the 20th century right up to the 50s, the art scene in colonial Dutch East Indies and later the young republic was proliferated with imageries of beautiful landscapes and women clad in elaborate and refined clothes which to the modernists were a gross distortion of the reality of the country. Such is the "hierarchy" of subjects and aesthetics as Sudjojono perceived when the artists of the opposing Mooie Indie clearly demonstrated a penchant for a romanticized and sentimentalised Indonesia with no relevance to the core of the community.
To be truthful to oneself as an artist and to the subject is the only solution to Sudjojono as he states "Each and every artist must embody these two qualities, truth and beauty. Not beauty in the sense recognised by the public at large, but from the point of view of aesthetics as understood by the artist himself." (Astri Wright, Soul, Spirit, and Mountain: Preoccupations of Contemporary Indonesian Painters, Oxford University Press, Kuala Lumpur, 1994, p. 157).
Truth to Sudjojono is not a mere objective conclusion of an individual but in a post-colonial context of the young republic, it is a truth that needs to be transcend with a sense of solidarity of comradeship with the community at large.
"Who will show the world: 'Look, this is how we are' A generation of will dare to say: 'This is how we are', which means this is our condition of life now, and these our new desires. The new artist would then no longer paint only the peaceful hut, blue mountains, romantic or picturesque and sweetish subjects, but also sugar factories and the emaciated peasant, the motor cars of the rich and the pants of the poor youth; the sandals, trousers and jacket of the man on the street. This is our reality. And the living artist who does not seek beauty in antiquity or in the mental world of the tourist, will himself live as long as the world exists. Because high art is work based on our daily life transmuted by the artist himself who is immersed in it, and then creates." (Ibid., p. 157-158)
In the light of these words, Pura Kembarn, Sanur is a delightful display of the artist's conviction and presenting Sudjojono at his best whimsical self. Depicting a temple in Bali in 1972, the composition is full of the deep emotional resonances which makes him a true expressionist artist and not the least, romantic in his own right. Unlike the Mooie Indie school of artist who would most inevitably highlight the grandeur and conventional beauty of a temple, the people's artist prefer to depict a quiet scene where blue sky, Frangipani and Palm trees, reign over the small temple, supposedly the main subject of the composition as the inscribed titled on the canvas suggests.
Sudjojono, however, has no interests in presenting a temple as the awesome but detached place of worship. His works are most importantly about the subtle expressiveness of the scene and his own poetic note of which he interprets it with the placement of idiosyncratic details such as the sporadic white Frangipani on the tree, the abridged pavilion to the right of the canvas and the strewn offerings in the foreground to the temple, thus imbued the work with a sense of spontaneity that in spite of its enduring nature as a scene transposed to a canvas, will always give the viewers a fleeting sense of a very unique moment captured.
