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Nor is it entirely accurate to claim that Europeans were the only consumers
of European paintings in the Indies, since there had been a small but significant
interest in European paintings amongst the Indonesian aristocracy for several
centuries. This interest continued right through to the modern period, as
demonstrated by the fact that several European artists of the Mooi Indie
style were invited to work in the palaces of Javanese princes; the Dutch
artist Gijsbert Nonus Op Ten Noort (1821-1870) worked in the palace of the
Susuhunan of Surakarta, and his fellow countryman, Isaac Isreals (1865-1934),
also worked in Surakarta in the court of the Mangkunegara. Even well into
the twentieth century, former Indonesian president Sukarno particularly
favoured the work of Mooi Indie artist Ernest Dezentjé (1885-1972,
figure 3) and gave his paintings as gifts to President Tito of Yugoslavia.
In fact, the introduction to the multi-volume publication illustrating paintings
from Dr. Sukarno's collection indicates that his aesthetic tastes favoured
romantic, naturalistic landscapes, given his preference for scenes of "green
mountains sprawling across the golden paddy fields, the little brooks meandering
over the stones, and the shimmering reflections of clouds fondling with
the sunshine on the hilltops."
There is a similar assumption that Mooi Indie art was produced exclusively
by Europeans, most of whom were merely idle tourists in the Indies for
brief periods of time, and could therefore not have had any real understanding
of or connection with the people and places they painted; their art must
then be, by definition, superficial and trivial. Certainly, specimens
of this type of tourist-artist did exist in significant numbers, and the
aforementioned Isaac Isreals is perhaps the best example. While on his
way to Java, this Dutch-born artist wrote "this is a useless journey,
I might as well admit it to myself, but there will be so much pleasure
in store for me at my return." When he returned to Europe three years
later, his opinion of the East had hardly changed; at that time he wrote
of his relief of finally returning to the true "centre of the world."
(4)
While in Indonesia, Isreals accurately recorded his surroundings in his
post-Impressionist style, but made no attempt to connect with or to study
at any depth the people or way of life of Indonesia. Aside from the subject
matter of a small number of canvases, his stay left no lasting impression
on his art, and even these few Indies-inspired works hardly differ from
the work he did previously and afterwards in Europe. As one art critic
at the time noted, "it is as if he is trying to make himself heard
by the Javanese people by yelling at them in Dutch…it is as if he
carried his Hague studio with him like a snail's shell."(5)
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But if we look a little closer we can also find many examples of Mooi
Indie artists who do not fit this tourist-artist stereotype. There was,
for example, a handful of Mooi Indie artists who were Indonesian, most
notably Abdullah Suriosubroto (1878-1941, figure 5), Mas Pirngadie (1865-1936),
and Wakidi (1889-1980, figure 7), who were all popular within colonial
society. Persagi later branded these artists as those who, "divorced
from the local reality, gave their allegiance to the Dutch," and
most art historical texts follow suit by dismissing their work with statements
such that they "attached value more to decorative rather than artistic
merit." But we would do well to remember that these artists were
the teachers and mentors for members of the next generation of Indonesian
artists; Mas Pirngadie, for example, taught Sudjojono and Soermo, both
of whom were later members of Persagi.
Perhaps more significant than these few Indonesian Mooi Indie artists
was the large number of those who were both Indonesian and European. As
greater numbers of Europeans came to Indonesia, there developed an increasing
distinction between those who had been born in Europe and those Indo-European
families who had settled in the Indies, many of whom were of mixed blood,
who comprised fully seventy-five percent of the "European" community
in Indonesia. With this in mind, a consideration of the Mooi Indie artists
becomes considerably more complex, because certainly the "shallow,
tourist-like" response to Indonesia experienced by temporary visitors
can not be equated with the relationship to the Indonesian landscape,
politics, and people experienced by such artists as Willem Bleckmann (1853-1952),
Leo Eland (1884-1952, figure 6) and the aforementioned Ernest Dezentjé
(figure 3), all of whom were born and raised in the Indies and were Javanese
on their mothers' side. With a consideration of the differing social status
of Indonesians, Indo-Europeans, and Europeans in mind, we should expect
to see evidence of these differences made manifest in the art of the period,
and indeed this bears out particularly well when we investigate the number
and nature of the images of landscapes and mountains in the art produced
by different types of Mooi Indie artists.
It would be difficult to overstate the importance of the social, artistic,
and spiritual roles played by the symbol of the mountain in Indonesia
since prehistoric times. According to Joseph Fischer, "to understand
the meaning, symbolism and historic importance of the mountain is to begin
to comprehend Indonesian belief and culture, particularly that of Java
and Bali." (6)
Mountains were traditionally seen as spiritually-charged sites; they are
central to both Hindu and Buddhist world views as symbols of Mount Meru,
and were considered the vehicles through which the gods could descend
to this world and from which human beings could communicate with the heavenly
realms. In this capacity as mediator between this world and the next,
the mountain is particularly connected to the figure of the artist, whose
traditional role has been a similar means by which the gap between this
world and the spiritual realms could be bridged.
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All of these connotations make the mountain a powerful symbol in the
Indonesian psyche, and imbues views of the Indonesian landscape with the
idea of kagunan, a local aesthetic rooted in the image of and
the language describing the mountain. It is, of course, impossible to
ignore the topographical omnipresence of mountains and volcanoes in the
region, particularly in Java and Bali, but for those for whom the spiritual
and symbolic importance of the mountain has been emphasised over many
years and though successive cultural and religious contexts, the image
of the mountain will be particularly sought out; for such people who express
themselves through the arts, it should be expected that the image of the
mountain will be a recurring theme. Indeed, this is supported by the fact
that the mountain and its variants, such as the tree of life, the gunungan
symbol of the wayang performances, the triangle and the stupa,
are some of the most common themes in traditional Indonesian art.
When we turn to the modern period, even a cursory examination reveals
that European Mooi Indie artists tended to favour town views, images of
anonymous Indonesians, or folkloristic scenes of the Indonesian way of
life. Landscapes painted by European artists often did not focus on the
prominence of mountains, but rather let them blend discretely into the
background, as in "Landscape" by Henry van Velthuysen (1881
- 1954, figure 1), for example. When they did focus their attention on
depicting mountains, they often did so in order to paint particular places
named and located in space and time: cartographer's mountains such as
that captured in "Pemandangan Di Modjo-Agung" by Gerard Adolfs
(1987 - 1908, figure 2).
In contrast, images by Indo-European and Indonesian Mooi Indie artists are
much less likely to be topographical studies of specific landscapes than
they are an attempt to capture the idea of the mountain, expressive of
the kagunan sensibility that frames the mountain as the balancing
central force in the physical and spiritual landscape. Such artists used
their time "to go to quiet places… far from the crowds, in
order to meditate upon the natural environment they intended to paint.
Apparently, these painters found 'a friend' who greeted their finest feelings
with joy in the natural environment that stretched as far as the eye could
see in its original beauty and peacefulness." (7)
The canvases that resulted from such connection to the landscape, while
quite often representative of actual scenes, are nevertheless imbued with
a symbolic sense of the idea of landscape more generally, with the mountain
as central, both in composition and importance.
This is true both of the Indo-European such as Ernest Dezentjé
(figure 3), Leo Eland (figure 6) and others, as well as the Indonesian
artists who specialised in the Mooi Indie style (figures 5, 7 and 8).
And although there are few landscapes by Raden Saleh (1807 - 1880), who
was the first Indonesian artist to triumph in western painting and who
is revered as the grandfather of Indonesian painting, those that he did
create do often feature the same kind of dominant, forceful mountain (figure
9). Even Sudjojono himself, for all his published acrimony towards Mooi
Indie, at times himself also painted landscapes in which commanding peaks
rise up from the Indonesian land and villages as perfect metaphors for
Indonesian strength and independence (figure 4).
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Thus, if not for the colonists who were often the consumers
of many of these paintings, then at least for the artists who painted
them, the mountain images in Mooi Indie paintings by Indonesian and Indo-European
artists were not simply decorative effect, but were also symbols of a
uniquely Indonesian spirituality and aesthetic belief. The western painting
techniques and styles that are used to classify artists as Mooi Indie,
and thus as foreigners, invaders, and oppressors, are in fact of minor
significance when weighed against the content, the themes and the motifs
that such artists use to communicate their spiritual, political and personal
relationship to Indonesia.
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