작품 상세

The swarthy young lad looks a regular model of the Bali-based Arie Smit, often depicted with only loose loincloth or draped sarong but this time resplendent with a silver necklace and pendant, marking a slightly improved economic means or perhaps a gift from somebody. With hair snaking down to his neck base and a thin moustache, and reasonably well-built, cuts an Orientalist picture of a people close to Nature and presumably untainted by the trappings of modernity. There is a re-creation of a utopia of Tahitian naturalism reminiscent of Gauguin’s. Balinese or Javanese, he may be one of the wannabe artists from Arie Smit’s loose collective of the Young Artists of Penestanan in Ubud, a group he created in 1960, or probably a close friend. The dour colours contrast with the usual vibrant riot in his linear flashes of sceneries and Balinese architecture. Dutchman Arie Smit has become part of the Balinese myth and folklore, having decided to take up Indonesian citizenship two years after the Republic’s Independence. In 1992, he received Bali’s highest honour, the Dharma Kusama, and in 1994, he was accorded the Arie Smit Pavilion at the Neka Museum. After studies in Graphic Design at the Academy of the Arts in Rotterdam, Arie Smit joined the Royal Netherlands East Indies Army in Batavia doing maps in lithographs. In World War II, he was captured by the Japanese and sent to work in the forced labour camps in River Kwai. He survived and returned to Indonesia, to teach graphics and lithographs at the Bandung Institute of Technology, before he was invited by Rudolf Bonnet to move to Bali in 1956, and took up the former residence of Walter Spies. Arie Smit died at the age of 99, only three weeks short of hitting the centurion mark.