Sindutomo Sudjojono

Lot Description S. SUDJOJONO (Indonesian, 1914-1986) Puppies signed with artist's monogram, dated and inscribed 'JAK 1975' (upper left); signed again 'S. Sudjojono' (lower centre) oil on canvas 50 x 70.5 cm. (19 3/4 x 27 3/4 in.) Painted in 1975 Provenance Acquired directly from the artist by the previous owner Acquired from the above by the present owner Saleroom Notice Please note Lot 3343 has below literature record: Museum S. Sudjojono, Visible Soul, Jakarta, Indonesia, 2006 (illustrated, pp. 406-407). Literature Museum S. Sudjojono, Visible Soul, Jakarta, Indonesia, 2006, page 406 - 407

S. SUDJOJONO (Indonesian, 1914-1986) Jalan di Muka Rumah Kami (The Road in Front of Our House) signed with artist's monogram, dated and inscribed 'DJAK 1959' and signed again 'S. Sudjojono' (lower left) oil on hardboard 86.5 x 82.5 cm. (34 x 32 1/2 in.) Painted in 1959 Ex-collection of Adam Malik, Vice President of the Republic of Indonesia (1978-1983) Sothebys Singapore, 3 October 1998, Lot 134 Private Collection, Jakarta, Indonesia Liem Tjoe Ing, Paintings from the Collection of Adam Malik: Vice President of the Republic of Indonesia, Jakarta, Indonesia, 1979 (illustrated, p. 24) Museum S. Sudjojono & Galeri Canna, Visible Soul, Jakarta, Indonesia, 2006 (illustrated, p. 402; and on back cover). Painted in 1959, the same year which celebrated Indonesian modern artist S. Sudjojono married the mezzo-soprano Rose Pandanwangi, Jalan di Muka Rumah Kami or The Road in Front of our House is one of the Sudjojono's earliest and most personal paintings to come up for auction. Part personal biography in chronicling the beginning of an important phase in the artist's life; and part historical document for the way the painting vividly captures the environment of its times, Jalan di Muka Rumah Kami spans the personal and the historical, a characteristic trait of the best of Sudjojono works. Sudjojono is best known for developing a theory and philosophy of modern Indonesian art as opposed to the Dutch-trained "Mooi Indie" style of naturalistic painting, which was tainted by its association with colonialism. As Sudjojono matured as an artist, he developed a loose, expressionistic style akin to that of Van Gogh. Painters, according to Sudjojono, must only resort to their own souls. To him, painting was the visualization of the soul. True artists should be free of conventional standards, artistic tradition, and the conventional pictorial grouping of people. The soul of a painter which becomes visible in a painting is what, in essence, gives value to that painting. In this way painters could truly paint anything and bring forth works of quality as long as they guarded the quality of thei soul. Through the 1950s, Sudjojono became more heavily involved in politics than at any other time in his life. The time he was politically active saw a distinct transformation in the underlying aesthetic value of his paintings. His works from the 1940s onwards, of figures and landscapes, were increasingly dedicated to reflecting a realist view of Indonesian life and culture. By the 1950s, Sudjojono was profoundly influenced by social realism. The subject matters in his paintings shifted in response to events in his personal life. Sudjojono joined the Indonesian Communist Party in 1950 and was made the director of the League of People's Culture (Lekra), the cultural arm of the party in the same year. In 1955, he was elected as a member of the house of representatives in Indonesia's first election as an independent country. During this time, his paintings were devoted to the subjects and depictions sanctioned by the political and left-leaning artist friends surrounding him, for instance, portraits of commoners, seemingly unremarkable, engaged in their daily activities. In Jalan di Muka Rumah Kami, the viewer is privileged with a view of the street from the home of Sudjojono, at once stepping into his life and seeing the world through the artist's eyes. Sudjojono married Rose Pandanwangi in 1959, after having met with the disapproval of his peers in the Indonesian Communist Party in the preceding three years of their relationship. Disillusioned with politics and forsaken by the artistic fraternity, Sudjojono and Rose Pandanwangi moved to the cheap area of Pasar Minggu (a district in Jakarta) to set up their new lives together, building their house room by room. Occasionally the construction had to be halted due to lack of financial resources. This was a period of great sacrifice for Sudjojono, fuelled only by his determination to seize the day and live with the person he loved. In order to make ends meet, Rose used her substantial musical gifts to teach piano and perform in radio concerts. Sudjojono received commissions for portraits, particularly from Adam Malik, ambassador to the Soviet Union and Poland at that time, and a close friend of his. Despite his tight financial straits, Sudjojono retained his pride and refused to let Adam Malik provide any sort of monetary aid - unless it was in the form of payment for the purchase of paintings, such as the portrait of Malik's wife, Nelly Malik. Many important works by Sudjojono, including Jalan di Muka Rumah Kami thus found their way into Adam Malik's personal collection. The scene depicted is one of a typical unkempt Indonesian roadside, where tropical trees and shrubs grow exuberantly, and quickly overlay any human presence. The trees, each distinctly marked with a band of white paint, jogs the memory of the city's older inhabitants who can recall a past era when the city's trees were painted as such, serving as street markers. The long shadows of the trees in the late afternoon cut across the road, which forms the diagonal axis in the painting, accentuating a particular moment in just another ordinary day, but one no longer found in the present-day sprawling metropolis that is Jakarta. Jalan di Muka Rumah Kami harks back to simpler days; a visual record of the change in the urban evolution of a city, and a tender record of Sudjojono's own life. In this regard, painting, for Sudjojono, becomes an act of inscribing the story of his own life on paper or canvas. Perhaps more so than any other modern Indonesian artist, Sudjojono was best known to regard painting as an autobiographical act. A sole figure - likely a soldier, clad in khaki fatigues, black boots and belt, his back facing the viewer - is the only human figure in the painting which bears an unmistakable quietude. Headed away from the viewer, the solider departs from the scene, away from the home that Sudjojono and Rose were beginning to build. If the solider can be read figuratively as a symbol of the Indonesia Communist Party's dominance in Indonesian politics in the 1950s, the painting could very well be an indication of Sudjojono's ideological shift, away from the communist doctrine, and a strand of social realism in painting which he upheld througout the 1950s. In this regard, Jalan di Muka Rumah Kami is a quintessential Sudjojono picture.

S. SUDJOJONO (Indonesian, 1914-1986) Danau Toba, Prapat (Lake Toba) signed with artist's monogram, dated, titled and inscribed 'jak, 1975, Danau Toba Prapat' (upper left); signed 'S. Sudjojono' (upper right) oil on canvas 60 x 80 cm. (24 x 31 in.) Painted in 1975 Collection of Mr. Ajip Rosidi, Indonesia Christie's Singapore, 1 April 2001, Lot 118 Acquired from the above sale by the present owner Amir Sidharta, Museum S. Sudjojono and Canna Gallery,Visible Soul, Jakarta, Indonesia, 2006 (illustrated, p. 252). Ajip Rosidi, Pustaka Jaya, Pelukis S. Sudjojono, Jakarta, Indonesia, 1982 (illustrated, p. 24). Sudjojono, widely considered the first of the Modern Indonesian painters, is credited with taking a leading role in the Indonesian nationalist movement, portraying social realism in his paintings. From the start of the 20th century to the 1950s, the art scene in colonial Dutch East Indies and later the young Indonesian Republic was proliferated with imageries of beautiful landscapes and women clad in elaborate and refined clothes, which to Indonesian modernists like Sudjojono and his contemporaries, was a gross distortion of the reality of the country. As a visceral reaction to these aesthetic principles, Sudjojono strived to represent Truth in his works, reflecting unbiased societal realities. As such, Sudjojono's representation of Indonesia's inherent beauty in Danau Toba, Prapat (Lake Toba) (Lot 160) is not wholly fantastical - he portrays real people and evidence of human existence in this work. Like other similar landscape paintings of the time, the focus of the painting is solely on the magnificent mountains overlooking the titular lake, dwarfing any human existence by their looming presence, reaffirming to the audience the might of Nature in its elements. Fringe pictorial elements of the composition show evidence of human existence, tempering the transcendental atmosphere created by the mountains' great crests. Danau Toba, Prapat (Lake Toba) is an exceptional example of S. Sudjojono's love for nature. Painted in 1975, this work exemplifies the evolution of Sudjojono's artistic style towards the realism movement, and indeed, shows his progression towards mellower and calmer subjects for his paintings. Towards the latter half of his painting career after he had renounced social realism, Sudjojono embarked on an extensive body of works that dealt with myths, legends, Biblical subjects and allergory. Hutan Terbakar (Lot 161) shows a scene of animals fleeing a jungle, immediately putting it within the allegorical tradition of such paintings executed by the Orientalists artists and the first modern painter from Java, Raden Syarif Bustaman Saleh. The dense and heavily worked over composition is typical of the 1970s works of Sudjojono and demonstrates his interest in social observation and commentary through the veiled language of allegorical paintings.

S. Sudjojono Pemandangan di Pinggir Jalan Cipayung (View of the Roadside, Cipayung) 1974 oil on canvas 60 x 88 cm signed (lower right); signed with artist's monogram and dated (upper right) S$ 40,000 - 60,000 US$ 31,490 - 47,240 Provenance: Acquired directly from the artist by present owner in mid 1980s. Literature: Ajip Rosidi, "PELUKIS S. SUDJOJONO", PT. Dunia Pustaka Jaya, Bandung, 2000. Illustrated in colour, p. 30. Sudjojono's landscape work should not be viewed merely as a lyrical representation of the nature. In the context of his leading role in expounding the Modernist movement and his vehement attack on the Mooi Indie school (Beautiful Indonesia) which he felt was hindering the progressive tendencies in the development of Indonesian Art as artists, indigenous of foreign, continued to emphasized only the beautiful landscape or women, clearly demonstrating a 'hierarchy of aesthetics' in the choice of subject-matters. To him, the practice of painting only pretty landscape and other 'acceptable' themes is an insincere idealization of reality. To be truthful to oneself as an artist and to the subject is the only solution to Sudjojono as he states "Every artist must take as his starting-point his own nature. An artist must be courageous in all things, especially when it comes to offering his ideas to the world, even if he does not receive any public recognition at all... Each and every artist must embody these two qualities, truth and beauty. Not beauty in the sense of recognized by the public at large, but from the point of view of aesthetics as understood by the artist himself." - Excerpts from a text by Astri Wright, from the book Soul, Spirit, and Mountain: Preoccupations of Contemporary Indonesian Painters, Oxford University Press, Kuala Lumpur, 1994, p. 157.

S. Sudjojono (1913 - 1986) Makan Nasi (Eating Rice) Signed with artist�s monogram and dated �1956� (upper left); Signed again (lower left) Oil on canvas 99 x 80 cm LITERATURE: Amir Sidharta, S. Sudjojono Visible Soul, Museum S. Sudjojono & Canna Gallery, Jakarta, 2006, illustrated in color, p.68. E. Borntraeger-Stoll & G. Orsini, Gerard Pieter Adolfs - The Painter of Java and Bali, 1898-1968, Wijk en Aalburg 2008, illustrated in color, p.318.