작품 상세

This drawing of two young dancers in the northern Dutch town of Laren was done by Rudolf Bonnet when he was 77, six years before his demise in Laren. It is as if he was recapturing his youth, when he was young and fancy free and the world was his oyster, where he travelled to north Africa and eventually Bali, where he had spent a total of two decades of his life painting and helping the local community as he was a friend of Cokorda Gde Agung Sukawati and Indonesian president Sukarno, who had collected 14 of his works but had him expelled, in 1957, when he refused to finish a commissioned portrait of Sukarno. He was instrumental in the Pita Maha movement and the design of the Museum Puri Lukisan. The best epilogue is that his ashes were brought back to Bali where he was burnt together in a grand cremation ceremony with his friend Cokorda. Rudolf Bonnet was one of the great personalities who fueled the Balinese legend as an artist’s paradise, having helped set up the Pita Maha movement (with Walter Spies and Gusti Nyoman Lempad), and the Museum Puri Lukisan, and received posthumously, the Dharma Kusuma Art Award, Indonesia’s highest cultural award. He was educated at the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten in Amsterdam, and arrived in Bali in 1929 where he had stayed until 1940. After time in internment camps in Pare-Pare, Bolong and Makassar, he returned to Bali and set up base in Campuan, where Antonio Blanco was. After his 1957 ban, he was to return to Bali in 1972 to complete work on the museum.