The artistic journey of Indonesia’s great painter, Sindoutomo Sudjojono (1913-1986), was as complex as his favorite subject — Indonesia’s independence and development. During his early career, Sudjojono eschewed the prevailing style of painting because its naturalistic, European conventions smacked to him of colonialism. Instead, he took up socialist realism, and put his brush at the service of the country’s communist party. By the 1960s, he had switched from propaganda to Pop Art. Toward the end of his life — disenchanted by Suharto’s right-wing regime and shunned by leftist artists who felt he had betrayed them — Sudjojono turned inward, experimenting with Expressionism and drawing partial inspiration from Balinese folklore.

A riveting retrospective of Sudjojono’s work at the Museum of the National University of Singapore Centre for the Arts until Aug. 24, entitled “Strategies Towards the Real: S. Sudjojono and Contemporary Indonesian Art,” now tries to shed light on his political context and artistic legacy. But it also goes a step further by hanging 16 of his rarely seen works alongside those of contemporary Indonesian artists — among them current auction-market favorites I. Nyoman Masriadi, Agus Suwage and Rudi Mantofani — in a bid to convey the influence Sudjojono has had on generations after him. “Sudjojono is regarded as the theorist of modern Indonesian art,” says Kwok Kian Chow, director of the Singapore Art Museum. “He casts a long shadow.”

A work often cited as proof is So Was Born the Generation of ‘66. Painted in that year, it shows a young artist, in a red hip-length jacket, holding up a paintbrush like a peace offering amid a violent streetscape. In the background, graffiti from the Partai Komunis Indonesia (PKI) is scrawled across the walls. The painting’s content is explicitly political. “[Sudjojono's] point is that all the artist needs is his paint and brush and he can take on the world,” explains Kuala Lumpur gallery owner Valentine Willie. Putting the artist center stage also gave the work a self-referential quality that would be echoed in the paintings of Masriadi and Suwage four decades later.

Indeed, in 2001 the Yogyakarta-based Suwage produced his own take, So Was Born the Generation of the Nineties. In the updated version, Sudjojono’s fragile political optimism, stemming from the hope that the Sukarno-led left and Suharto-led right might reconcile, has given way to cynicism. The expression of the artist in Sudjojono’s painting is serene; in Suwage’s, it is aloof. Gone are the cerulean sky, the chaotic melee of betjak drivers and army lorries, and any other form of life except for the artist, who is stripped of the mobility of Sudjojono’s figure and stands pickled in stiff solitude. “We are living in a different age from Sudjojono,” says Suwage of his bleaker version. “We are fed up with politics.” Nostalgic for the social engagement of artists like Sudjojono, he adds, “In the ’90s there was a booming art market, but we artists are not necessarily happy. [Sudjojono] was closer to reality.”

Born in Sumatra, Sudjojono went to school in Bandung. According to his daughter Maya, he trained for several years under a Japanese artist, who was likely an officer in the World War II army of occupation. Otherwise he earned a precarious living through school teaching.

Despite the hardships under the Japanese, and the ensuing guerrilla war against the Dutch, the 1940s were considered a good time to be an artist. Clustered in Yogyakarta were painters eager to break with the Dutch school of painting in Indonesia, of which the preeminent exemplar was the Bali-based Rudolf Bonnet. The pastoral depictions of Indonesian village life produced by Bonnet and others were dismissed by Sudjojono as so much shallow Orientalism. “For my people, reality is the reality of rice,” he wrote in 1950, arguing for a muscular realism. One of the painters who was moved by Sudjojono’s words was Hendra Gunawan, and in the early 1950s the admiring Hendra (who is better known simply by his first name) joined Sudjojono in the cultural arm of the PKI, the Institute of People’s Culture, referred to by its Indonesian acronym LEKRA. Sudjojono was to become its leader. “In Asia, art was integrated into nationalist movements,” says Kwok. “Sudjojono was in the forefront of this.”

Married by this time, Sudjojono was beginning to enjoy modest success both as an artist and as a communist politician. In the early 1950s, he went on a government-sponsored tour to Europe, where, in Amsterdam, he met a beautiful Eurasian music student of German-Indonesian origin named Rose Pandanwangi. She too was married, but upon her return to Indonesia they began an affair. In 1955, Sudjojono was elected to Indonesia’s first parliament under the banner of the PKI, which had become part of a shaky coalition cobbled together by President Sukarno. A few years later, Sudjojono disclosed his affair with Rose to PKI officials, and declared his intention to marry her. He had eight children from his first marriage by this time, and Rose had three from hers. The PKI had cultivated a morally upright, pro-family image and was fearful of the ensuing scandal. It threatened Sudjojono with expulsion.

“The head of the party tried to prevent him from divorcing his first wife,” says Rose today. But Sudjojono refused to comply, and in 1958 quit the PKI and his parliamentary post. He married Rose the following year. It was a painful decision, as his parliamentary salary disappeared, along with government patronage for his art. “We didn’t have a lot of money,” recalls Maya, who says most of the family’s income came from her mother’s piano lessons and singing (Rose was a mezzo-soprano who frequently performed on national radio).

It was under Suharto, however, that Sudjojono began to blossom as an artist. Unencumbered by the constraints of socialist realism, he began to experiment with Pop Art and Expressionistic techniques. In a time of dictatorship, it was perhaps just as well. “The Suharto era made it impossible for political thought to be rendered in art,” says Ahmad Mashadi, head of the Museum of the National University of Singapore Centre for the Arts. In fact, by quitting LEKRA early, Sudjojono escaped the punishment that Suharto was to mete out to leftist artists, and became the most prominent figure of what Kwok calls “the more complex visual terrain in the 1970s and ’80s.”

Given the scope of its ambition, “Strategies Towards the Real” is perhaps bound to falter in parts. To begin with, although the influence Sudjojono exerted over painters like Masriadi and Suwage is clear, it is less certain that he shaped the work of the more avant-garde artists in the show. (One thinks, in particular, of a Mantofani painting of a giant golf ball – shaped globe.) As the captions around the works are minimal, and the catalogue filled with opaque jargon, it is also frequently left to the viewer to connect the dots between Sudjojono’s works, and between Sudjojono and the other painters.

Even so, the attempts to illuminate the life of a neglected master, and to establish his position in relation to contemporary Indonesian artists, make this show welcome. At a time when auctions are pushing Indonesian art prices ever upward, distinguishing the great from the good is becoming difficult. “This is a museum show and it explores the intellect,” says Jasdeep Sandhu, owner of Singapore’s Gajah Gallery. “That’s very much needed now.”

By NEEL CHOWDHURY (TIME)

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