Affandi

Private Asian Collection

Sardjana Sumichan, Affandi, Vol II, Bina Lestari Budaya Foundation, Jakarta, Singapore Art Museum, Singapore, 2007, p. 87 and 338

Excellent overall condition as viewed. Examination under ultraviolet light reveals no sign of restoration. Framed.
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Distinguished for his unique painting style and idiosyncratic subject matter, Affandi was considered the consummate expressionist painter in Asia during the mid-20^th century. He was born in 1907 and grew up surrounded by nationalist leaders and literati, eventually becoming an active player in the struggle for Indonesian independence. Entrenched in the revolutionary aesthetic movements that occurred on a global scale during the World-War and Post-World-War period, Affandi became the founder of the Lembaga Pelukis Rakyat (The People’s Painters’ Association), which invigorated Indonesian artists to focus on populist themes, commoners, and the indigenous human experience in its most candid form.

Affandi was aware of the pre-existing art historical representations in Indonesia; the Mooi Indie genre which captured romantic depictions of the archipelago during the colonial period, the Pita-Maha style, an amalgamation of the local wayang forms with stylized techniques by foreign primitivist painters, and the Persagi (Association of Indonesian Draughtsmen) movement that encouraged an art form that articulated the artist’s visions while simultaneously conveying the thoughts of the nation and culture at large. In grave disaccords with these exotic and orientalist portrayals of his nation, Affandi elucidated the genuine nature of his country through his art, emphasizing a pan-Indonesian existence that would ultimately instigate and propel the evolution of a truly Indonesian modernism.

The present lot was painted in 1957, immediately when Affandi returned to Bali years after having visited for the first time in 1939. He voyaged there strictly for a purpose: to capture events that rightly reflected the Balinese life such as cockfights, traditional dances and particular scenes that touched him. He admitted that “I too like beautiful things, but they do not necessary provide inspiration for my work. My subjects are expressive rather than beautiful. I paint suffering – an old woman, a beggar, a black mountain... My great wish is that people learn a little from my work. “

In keeping with his longing to describe the honest Indonesian experience, Affandi chose to render a group of Balinese men as they nongkrong, or gather with friends, while drinking tuak manis, sweet rice-wine. Sitting cross-legged on the floor in the foreground of the painting, the ungainly kinsmen imbibe gulps of this local concoction of palm, yeast and sugar in the night alfresco. The manner in which they urgently guzzle down their liquor is strikingly similar to that depicted in The Drinkers, which was painted by Dutch Post-Impressionist Vincent Van Gogh after a woodblock print by Honoré Daumier. Emotionally affected by the circadian activities of the humble, these three artists’ expressions resonated with the subject of alcohol as a form of escapism. Though the men portrayed are clearly in the company of their friends, they do not engage one another. Instead, they avidly concentrate on swallowing their alcohol with such indulgence and haste as to satisfy a thirst that transcends the mere physical. This reveals the bleak despondency of inebriation, serving as a social commentary imbued with a deep sense of pathos.

Behind these animated men in Minum Tuak are roosters, their heads protruding through the large, cylindrical cages in which they are confined, signifying the anticipation of a Balinese cockfight. The cockfight, or tajen, is an ancient ritual in Balinese Hinduism practiced by men in order to banish evil spirits. A crouching man wearing a conical, Indonesian hat known as the caping proudly lifts his gamecock as he approaches the cockpit. A yellow outline on the right side of the backdrop delineates a prowling dog with his tail upright and ears erect, insinuating a sense of anxiousness and excitement in the work. While the kinsmen seem content in the familiarity of their peers and the routine of this age-old sport, the scene is made tense by the urgency and forceful strokes so prevalent in Affandi’s expressionistic painting style.

Enraptured by the process of painting his work, Affandi squeezed paint directly from the tube and applied it onto the raw canvas, forcefully spreading the wet pigments across the surface with his bare hands, wrists, fingers and palms. It is evident when beholding this dynamic work that the riveted artist painted with the spontaneity and zeal akin to that of Action Painting, suggesting that the physical act of painting itself was an essential aspect of the finished product. This inimitable technique afforded Affandi with the aesthetic liberty otherwise stymied by the paintbrush, ultimately eradicating the physical distance between artist and creation. According to the critic Herbert Read, Affandi had succeeded in ‘developing a new course of Expressionism.”

As manifest in Minum Tuak, Affandi’s quintessential modus provided his works with a thick, palpable impasto and three-dimensional quality, which affected his overall use of color, shape and line. Comparable to the sinuous lines Van Gogh utilized to represent the clouds, clothes and grass, the swirling outlines in the Affandi’s work infuses a distinct rhythm, vitality and soul to the scene, allowing the artist to express his feelings in a tactile manner. In this manner, Affandi could pervade his work with a certain crudeness and roughness to amplify his disapproving thoughts about these drinkers. Much like French artist Paul Gauguin who experimented with the exaggeration of features and curvilinear forms in order to stylize his figures, as seen in his painting Vision after the Sermon, Affandi could distort his figures by dileneating their forms so that they appear hyperbolically grotesque. The paint, uncontrollably squeezed from its tubes, organically gnarled the outlines of Affandi’s figures.

Employing the paint straight from their containers, Affandi did not mix his pigments to find certain hues that would mimic natural tones of reality. Instead, he was dependent on the colors that were manufactured. As a self-taught artist, Affandi mastered academic painting with verisimilitude after having garnered the fundamentals of anatomy and perspective from merely observing an Italian artist in Bandung. By merging these scrupulous rules with the passionate strokes that expressed his simmering emotions, Affandi created his own form of naturalism: a type hauled from the reality he viewed and filtered through sentiments he sensed.

Similar to Norwegian symbolist and expressionist artist Edvard Munch who adopted penetrating and overstated colors to express the psyche of the characters in his works, Affandi used concentrated colors that would sincerely enliven the figures in his emotionally charged painting. In his work Jealousy, Munch uses color to convey a poignant turmoil between three characters: a man with an acidic green face representing his bitter envy as he covets the red-skinned woman, the object of his lust. A second man with a sickly, yellow countenance stands in between the two, his existence isolating them from one another and drawing a vicious love triangle. The obscured backdrop in Jealousy amplifies the bright colors of the alienated figures and suggests a bleak energy, akin to the dark setting of Affandi’s Minum Tuak. Affandi paints the people an intense red with a defined layer of black and yellow. Deep red passion, sunny yellow elation and powerful black uncouthness fuse together to emphasize the myriad emotions that transfuse these parched men, who quench themselves irrepressibly as they eagerly await the cockfight.

Affandi often depicted men drinking rice wine and engaging in cockfighting, recurring subjects in his vast opus. Upon viewing this masterpiece, it is clear that Affandi did not philosophize his paintings; he merely depicted what he witnessed in a matter-of-fact manner. As a curious artist who integrated into the Balinese culture, he explored his subjects on a personal level in order to truthfully comprehend them before immortalizing them. In an effort to shatter the rose-tinted glasses through which depictions of Indonesia were filtered, Affandi inadvertently created an oeuvre that now serves as an important testament to Indonesian disposition during its infant stages of modern history.