Bali Experience

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.