Fading colors of paradise

The Museum Puri Lukisan is a lovely place to look at the rich history of Balinese painting. From the town’s main street you descend a flight of stairs, cross a stream and then climb a small, wooded hillside before coming to lush gardens, where banyan trees and lily ponds surround several traditional pavilions stuffed with fine examples of the local painting styles. Tropical breezes waft through the galleries, and geckos climb over the pictures.

But the museum’s lack of pretension -- not to mention air conditioning, closed doors, guards or a salesperson in its gift shop -- is also a big problem. The Puri Lukisan is celebrating its 50th anniversary this year. It’s the first private museum on Bali and a showcase of the local arts explosion that turned the village of Ubud into the cultural capital of the fabled island. Whether the museum’s treasures survive another half century, however, is an open question.

“Ninety percent of our collection is not in good condition, especially the works on paper,” says museum director Tjokorda Bagus Astika, whose family has been involved with the institution since its beginning. “We need air conditioning and we need to clean the art, but we don’t have the money. It’s a very serious situation. Our master plan is to make a new building, but we don’t have the budget. We’re waiting. Over time our collection will become more damaged. The collection is irreplaceable.”

Tjokorda Gde Putra Sukawati, whose father was one of the co-founders of the museum, agrees that the situation is dire.

“It’s possible the collection could last another 50 years, but maybe not,” he says. “It’s already changed; the colors on paper have faded.”

Puri Lukisan means Palace of Painting, and the museum is a symbol of the fruitful meeting of two very different cultures: European draftsmanship and Balinese religious art.

Europeans have been smitten with the beauty of Bali since 1597, when the first Dutch East India Co. sailing vessel stopped at the island and two crew members jumped ship. But it wasn’t until the first quarter of the 20th century that Europeans arrived in sizable numbers. By the 1930s, about 3,000 tourists a year were visiting Bali and a small expat community had sprung up. One of the members was Rudolf Bonnet, a Dutch painter who made his way to the island in 1929. He didn’t leave for 30 years.

Bonnet became friends with Walter Spies, a legendary German-Russian arts impresario who had settled in Ubud in 1925. The two Europeans were guests at the palace of Tjokorda Gde Agung Sukawati, a prince from the town’s royal family who eagerly embraced cultural tourism.

“Our palace welcomed the first Western people who influenced Balinese art,” the prince’s son Putra Sukawati says. “The two sides influenced each other.”

For an arts lover, the island was indeed a paradise. The Balinese had an exquisite culture, much of it based on the epic Hindu narratives of the Maharabhata and Ramayana. Temples were everywhere, filled with dancing, music and sculpture.

“Everybody in Bali,” observed the late painter and writer Miguel Covarrubias, who lived in Bali in the 1930s, “seems to be an artist.”

But drawing and painting were not the most refined of the local arts. Two-dimensional representational art was largely limited to unimaginatively illustrated astrological charts and static renderings of wayang kulit, or shadow puppet, plays.

Bonnet and Spies encouraged their friends to experiment, giving out drawing supplies such as pencils, paper and Chinese ink. The duo also suggested that artists look for inspiration around them, in the sights that the Europeans found so wondrously picturesque: terraced rice fields, bustling markets, intricate religious festivals.

The movement came to be called the Balinese Renewal. “Painting,” Covarrubias wrote in his classic book, “Island of Bali,” first published in 1937, “underwent a liberating revolution.”

Revolution may be too strong a word. The hallmarks of Balinese painting -- somber colors, crowded scenes, a horror of empty space -- remained, but perspective and modeling and a broadening of subject did infuse the work with vitality and charm. And the best-known Ubud artist was also among the most radical: I Gusti Nyoman Lempad, whose sinuous black-and-white drawings mined mythological themes but with an unprecedented freedom of line that marked off bold swaths of blank space.

In 1936, Spies, Bonnet, the prince and a number of local artists set up an association called Pita Maha, meaning “grand ancestor(s),” which involved more than 100 painters who staged exhibitions, organizing shows as far afield as New York and Paris. They also dreamed of building a museum to display their work.

World War II got in the way. Spies was imprisoned by the Dutch in Sumatra as an enemy alien and died in captivity. Bonnet too was interned, in Sulawesi, although afterward he returned to Ubud.

In 1952, Bonnet and the elder Sukawati created a foundation, Yayasan Ratna Wartha, to raise money for a museum. The government and private donors, such as the Ford Foundation, contributed. Two years later, the building’s cornerstone was laid. Bonnet designed the museum, and his personal collection formed the core of the institution’s holdings.

But in 1958, Indonesia’s increasingly nationalist government forced Bonnet to repatriate to Holland, where he labored in exile on behalf of the museum. He wasn’t able to visit Bali again until 1972.

When he returned, Bonnet discovered that the great mural by Lempad on the outside of the main building was deteriorating in the heat and damp of the tropics.

The artist was able to repair the mural, but it was a harbinger of the future: The same equatorial climate that made Bali so fecund also precipitated decay at an alarming rate.

“Nothing in Bali is made for posterity,” Covarrubias had noted decades earlier. “The only available stone is a soft sandstone that crumbles away after a few years, and the temples and reliefs have to be renewed constantly; white ants devour the wooden sculptures, and the humidity rots away all paper and cloth, so their arts have never suffered from fossilization.”

In 1978, Tjokorda Gde Agung Sukawati and Bonnet both died (as did Lempad, who was believed to be 116). The two friends were cremated in a joint ceremony that was one of the biggest funerals ever held on Bali.

Art abounds

Today art is to Ubud what sand is to a beach. The town, which has a population of about 30,000, has four significant museums. There seems to be an art gallery every 10 feet. Most of what’s on sale, of course, is tourist schlock -- something Covarrubias was complaining about 70 years ago. (“The tourists,” he wrote, “generally prefer hideous statuettes made by beginners or the gaudy weavings.”)

And somewhat ironically, you won’t see paintings by either Spies or Bonnet at the Puri Lukisan, where the collection focuses on indigenous paintings. Instead you have to go to the newer museums, such as Neka Art Museum, which opened in 1982, or the Agung Rai Museum, which opened in 1996 (neither of which, by the way, is air-conditioned).

The Puri Lukisan (website: mpl-ubud.com) can seem less a professional art institution than a family jewel. Director Tjokorda Bagus Astika is a civil engineer by training (his father, Agung Mas, who was also involved with the museum, was better known as an expert gamelan orchestra player who taught at UCLA in the 1960s).

The museum’s only source of revenue is ticket sales (about $2 per person); its annual operating budget is about $25,000. On an average day about 40 people visit -- down from more than a hundred before the deadly terrorist attack in Kuta in October 2002, which killed more than 200 people and caused the island’s tourism industry to crater.

“The bombing was very bad for us,” Astika says.

A few years ago, the museum hired a team of Belgian art experts to inspect the collection; it recommended that two dozen works receive immediate conservation and that the entire collection be housed in a climate-controlled facility. With the help of a Dutch foundation, the museum was able to have one painting restored.

“Please, preserve these paintings quickly!” a visitor from France noted in the guest book. “Very nice,” said another, “but so hot.”

Astika says a new building would cost about $50,000. And conservation work for the collection might cost as much. So far the museum has raised about $5,000 -- half from the younger Sukawati, half from a Dutch foundation.

“The government says there is no money,” Astika says. “They give advice only, not money.”

Down the street from the museum, Tjokorda Gde Putra Sukawati sits in an opulently decorated, open-air pavilion at his family’s palace. He’s the seventh generation of Ubud’s royal family.

“For us it’s a lot of money,” he says. “It’s not enough to restore the paintings. For the future we need climate control. We need an expert in museums to run it. In all museums in Indonesia we’ve got problems with conservation. There are no museums with air conditioning.”

Although Sukawati is head of the museum’s foundation, his day job is running the family business, the Tjampuhan Hotel (Spies’ former cottage is available for rent on the property). And business is not good.

“The last two years have been very bad -- the worst I’ve ever seen,” he says.

As Sukawati talks, tourists wander around the palace grounds, climbing the pavilion steps past the sign that says “keep off” and taking snapshots of the prince in his gilded receiving area.

Sukawati smiles for a picture, and then resumes talking and the smile falls from his face.

“We need action, but without funds what can we do?” he says. “Nothing. I try to do my best. I love the museum, but I can’t do much. If I concentrate on the building, the paintings are gone. If I use my money on restoring the paintings, I can’t do much for the building. Which one should I save?”