Basuki Abdullah

Private Collection, Indonesia

This work is in good overall condition as viewed. Examination under ultraviolet light reveals restoration along the edges and surface of the painting. Framed.
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Basuki Abdullah came from a lineage of painters. At four years of age, Basuki Abdullah began learning how to paint from his father, who was himself a noted artist in Indonesia at the time. His nearly eighty year life span saw him being born in the royal capital of Solo, travel to the Netherlands for an art education at the Koninklijke Academie van Beeldende Kunsten (Royal Academy of Visual Arts), become a court painter and develop a close relationship with the first President of Indonesia, Ir. Sukarno. Trained in the Mooi Indies (Beautiful Indies) aesthetic and raised in Java, Basuki Abdullah’s work is a lens into a long history of Dutch occupation in the hearts and minds of Indonesians, an influence that is integral in the narrative of art histories in Indonesia.

Distant Dreams demonstrates Basuki Abdullah’s deft brush and unparalleled versatility, seamlessly marrying landscape painting, figurative painting and even elements of still life painting into a single composition. This painting has a strong sense of a background, middle ground and foreground, aided by the meandering of the waterfall. Lush trees of green and the cascades of the waterfall animate the background, giving the piece a sense of movement and energy. The rock formation and the flow of water in the river constitutes the middle ground, acting as a segue between the animation of the background and the stillness of the foreground. The foreground acts as a haven of stillness, with three nude women languorously relaxing in various positions by a quiet creek. One woman is tying her hair with her back facing the viewer, another is knelt against the edge of the rock with a cloth around her waist, and the last woman is leaning backwards with one leg in midair, as if about to dip her toes into the clear water.

Basuki Abdullah used subject matter to meticulously explore beauty in all its iterations, filtering the scenes around him through the eyes of both someone who grew up in Java and was taught to see in a Western school. The women here are shown to have voluptuous proportions and slender limbs, with heavy, hooded eyelids and full lips. The natural landscape is also portrayed in ethereal beauty, with the waterfall in tones of white, blue and gold within a field of greens and blacks.

This piece is especially noted for his use of light and shadow as an exploration of different types of form. Basuki Abudllah trained in the tradition of Dutch Old Masters such as Rembrandt, who is most noted for his use of chiaroscuro, a form of lighting that believes that the solidity of form is best depicted by a stark contrast between light and dark, allowing light to fall on the subject in order to create dramatic three dimensional forms that allowed forms to transcend a canvas. This can be most clearly seen in how the bodies of these women are depicted: even small details, such as how shadows fall upon a ribcage, are carefully rendered. As the Japanese aesthetician Junichiro Tanizaki wrote in In Praise of Shadows, “Were it not for shadows, there would be no beauty.”