Neka Art Museum
It was the slow season and a Sunday, an unexpectedly ideal day to visit museums, so I set out early on an art tour of Ubud starting from the Neka Art Museum in Sanggingan to the Agung Rai Art Museum in Pengosekan. “The museum is easy to find. It’s opposite Naughty Nuri’s warung,” Pak Neka told me over the phone. Pande Wayan Suteja Neka walked down the stairs from his Kris Museum to greet me in company with Garrett Kam, the veteran guidebook writer and eminent art historian who now serves as the museum’s curator. The Kris Museum, one of only two in all of Indonesia, we would save for the last. First came the recommended circuit of the whole complex of seven major exhibits or “halls” starting with the wayang-style painting gallery straight through the door right off the lobby.
This was the first of a series of exhibits that my hosts led me through that covered every style of art from impressionism to abstract expressionism. Each turn presented something surprising – a new school of art, rooms full of vigorous contemporary pieces, galleries devoted to portraiture, East West art or artists from abroad. A few painters - Dutch-born Arie Smit (born 1916) and I Gusti Nyman Lempad who died in 1978 at the amazing age of 121 - had their own pavilions. A photography center featured selected photos by American Robert A. Koke who opened Kuta’s first hotel and brought surfing to Bali. Taken between 1937 and 1941, the old black and white images showed dancers, ceremonies and village life during Bali’s short-lived age of innocence. The galleries display a total of 420 consummate artworks, 30% of which are Balinese, 30% other Indonesians, and 40% foreign artists. It took Pak Neka 40 years to amass his collection which is so all-encompassing that art students from Bali’s Udayana University must study its works in order to graduate.
Before he started collecting, Pak Neka was a primary school teacher for 10 years during which time he had observed foreign tourists buying Balinese paintings. At 27, he started pursuing a profession in the art world. Although he didn’t paint himself, art was in his blood. His father, Wayan Neka, was a prize-winning woodcarver. Pak Neka opened his first gallery on Ubud’s main road in 1966. In 1975, he traveled to Europe with Rudolph Bonnet to study museums. The Neka Art Museum was officially opened in 1982. In attendance were some of the greats of Indonesian art, among them Afrandi and Hendra Gunawan. Situated at that time deep in the countryside, the event had to be held in the daytime because of no electricity.
Today, his wife Gusti Made Srimin is in charge of both the Neka Gallery on Jl. Raya Ubud and the Neka Art Museum in Sanggingan. “She makes the money and I spend the money,” he said. The family’s extravagantly laid out museum sprawls over a huge traditionally designed compound of one hectare. The first foreign painter he bought was Rudolph Bonnet’s iconic Temptation of Arjuna which remains one of his personal favorites, along with Ari Smit’s bold Rhythms of Life in coloring-book style, the joyous Three Masked Dancers by Anton Kustia Widjaja and the illusionists semi-imaginary Mutual Attraction by Abdul Aziz.
If you see nothing else, take in these seminal paintings which are endlessly reproduced in publications of Indonesian art. Also check out two of Affandi’s self-portraits, painted in 1976 and 1978 by spontaneously using his hands and not his brushes, manifesting extreme suspicion and emotional turmoil. I remarked on the sheer number of portraits and even statues of Pak Neka found all over the museum. “Artists like my face,” the spry 71-year-old explained. Indeed, with his dark gleaming eyes, aquiline nose and bright smile, artists feel privileged to paint such a well-known patron of the arts.
But no matter how many questions I asked Pak Neka about his remarkable collection of paintings, the conversation always seemed to find its way back to his beloved Kris Museum. “My real roots are as a blacksmith. Kris are my calling in life.” The pande part of his name indicates his place among a long line of metallurgists. Just before leaving, Pak Neka took a handsome, perfectly balanced and magically powerful Madurese kris from a glass case. He unsheathed it and tried to stand it on the point of its blade. Finding it difficult to steady, he called his assistant Pak Ketut who within seconds had it standing straight and tall. I gasped in amazement, not believing what I was seeing.
Blanco Renaissance Museum
I met Antonio Blanco, already famous and wearing his trademark beret, in 1972 when a friend and I strolled across the old one-lane iron bridge and turned up the steep winding driveway shrouded in trees. One of his daughters was winnowing rice bare breasted in a corner of the inner courtyard. The 60-year-old Catalonian artist came out from his studio to greet us in the small gallery and asked us where we were from. He was an amusing and intriguing character with a theatrical personal style. Then without a word he disappeared. I heard later that he had the habit of hiding behind the walls listening to what visitors were saying about his paintings.
Blanco had already received many visitors far more illustrious than we, a company as diverse as Mick Jagger, Hubert Humphrey, William Holden, Ingrid Bergman and the Emperor of Ethiopia. Sukarno, a incorrigible womanizer, had begun collecting his erotic paintings shortly after the revolution. The country’s first president granted him special permission to remain in Bali as long as he wished.The maestro’s original studio is still there, preserved exactly as he had left it, but the modest gallery we visited 38 years ago is now buried within an extraordinary three-story Italianate rococo structure guarded by two giant mythological stone dragons and a 15-meter-high green marble archway at the top of a long flight of steps.
Don Antonio Blanco, born in 1912 in Manila, arrived in Bali in 1952, drawn by Covarrubias’s book Island of Bali. Within a year, he had married Ni Ronjia, his first model who was a well-known Balinese dancer. He was 42, she was 17. His wife’s likeness is enshrined in a huge painting, simply entitled “Balinese Dancer,” on the back wall of the ground floor. Through a doorway to one side is a room filled with erotic collages and illustrated poetry crowded with hidden meanings. Though my guide Ibu Ketut told me the room was off-limits to children, these mildly titillating collages of paper and fabric were oddly quaint by today’s standards.
A narrow stairway led down to the family veranda just off the painter’s studio, its wall covered with family photographs, some from the 1950s, recording phases in the lives of several generations, as well as friends, other artists and VIP visitors. In one, the Grand Maestro was posing with Michael Jackson. I shook the hand of Mario Blanco, Antonio Blanco’s only son, a highly respected artist in his own right. Wearing glasses and a Balinese udeng instead of his father’s beret, Mario bears little physical likeness to his flamboyant father. He had a Balinese sensibility, mild-mannered and impeccably polite.
Unlike his father, Mario he didn’t hide himself away but led me straightaway into a gallery of his own paintings just off the verandah. Whereas his father’s subject matter was almost exclusively women and girls, Mario specializes in symbolic still lifes. Like his father, Mario puts inordinate attention into his frames which are filled with bizarre details. But Mario’s obvious talent was not Antonio Blanco’s doing. “This is difficult to tell you,” he told me, “but my father never encouraged me to paint. He wanted me to take up law or medicine instead.”
Agung Rai Museum of Art
I like the way Balinese men of certain age – say between 40 and 50 - shake hands. When I met Pak Agung on a rainy afternoon, he held my hand and led me not into the galleries but straightaway to the back of the museum where some fieldworkers were harvesting rice. “Right out the window you see this,” he said with pride. This is what his cousin Agung Rai, the owner and director ARMA, means when he describes the various buildings that make up the big complex as a “living museum,” surrounded as it is by everyday Balinese life.
Not just a museum but a dynamic all-inclusive culture center of the arts, ARMA has exhibits, conference hall, art gallery, performing stage, dance classes, bookshop, boutique, reference library, Thai restaurant, coffee shop and rice fields all spread over six hectares. Acting as a virtual ambassador of the arts, Agung Rai – who was away in Thailand at the time marrying off one of his daughters – began his professional career in the late 1960s selling souvenirs and paintings to tourists on the hot stands of Kuta Beach. With a sharp eye for quality and a deep knowledge of Balinese painting, he built a reputation for honesty and tenacious support of local artists, eventually becoming one of Bali’s most successful art entrepreneurs.
With his earnings, Agung Rai opened his first gallery in 1978 and ARMA was opened in 1996. The galleries, containing 250 paintings on permanent display, are housed in two massive thatched roofed high-ceilinged Balinese-style structures, one displaying traditional art and the other contemporary art. As Pak Agung led me up through the sweltering 1st floor gallery we viewed somber paintings from as early as the 1940s. The little ambient light made the magically charged demons and spirits even darker and more ominous. Extravagant wall space was devoted to these old relics.
We walked down a stairs to the ground floor to confront a fearsome pair of Barong Landung puppets with exceedingly rare gringsing double-weft ikat cloths, Kamasan-style paintings and old decorative carved wood panels on the walls. The most captivating was the Walter Spies exhibit with 12 full color reproductions of his paintings, photos of his life in Europe after the WW I, and black and white still shots taken from Insel der Damonen, a classic 1933 film by Viktor von Plessen for which Spies did the casting and choreography. We next walked to the Bale Dao (West Building) specializing in modern works, but my main interest was the marble-floored “treasure” room containing Agung Rai’s private collection of prewar Dutch, German and Austrian artists who lived and worked on Bali.
Here was the only Walter Spies painting on Bali, a haunting canvas of Calonarang, a charming Covarrubias of dancers putting on makeup, and a 1837 oil of a Javanese nobleman and his wife by the portraitist and landscape painter Raden Saleh, considered the father of Western-style Indonesian painting. After the tour we sat on the steps. In his deep voice, Pak Agung told me about the early days in the art business on Bali when he along with Agung Rai sold paintings in Kuta. “I wasn’t as successful as my cousin. I had to go back to woodcarving to support my three daughters. Agung Rai understood paintings better than me. And he was a good talker.”
Practicalities: Blanco Renaissance Museum: Campuan, Ubud 80571 Tel. 0361-975502, email a_blanco@indo.net.id, website: www.blancobali.com. Mario Blanco’s website: www.mademario.com. Open 9 am-5 pm daily. Gallery, gift shop, lithographs of both artists, soft cover catalog Fabulous Blanco ($100).
Neka Museum of Art: North of Campuan, 2.5 km from Ubud. Open 8:30 am-5 pm daily. Art museum and commercial gallery. In the lobby postcards are for sale of the museum’s best-known works as well as art books and the museum’s catalogs.
Agung Rai Museum of Art: Pengosekan, tel. 0361-975742, emails: info@armamuseum.com, arma@indosat.net.id. Located just beyond the Kokokan Club in Pengosekan if coming from Peliatan. Museum catalog Rp50,000.
