The Humanist

Indonesia's best artist is an affable, intense gnome of a man who bears the single name Affandi and admits to a single-minded devotion to art as human expression. Affandi once defined humanism as meaning "all that is right and good to every living creature. When I am making a painting, and suddenly I hear a child that is crying because its doll has fallen into the water, I have to stop painting and help the child first."

Despite such interruptions, which come frequently in Affandi's bamboo cottage in Djokjakarta, he produces a dozen or so pictures each year. He does them in less than a day each, dancing before the canvas, squeezing his lines straight from tube to picture, and smearing the colors into place with his bare hands. The results are not expressionistic abstractions but brilliant and vibrant emotional renderings of the world around him.

The son of a clerk on a Dutch sugar plantation, Affandi was born poor in central Java, taught himself to paint. Beginning with a modest show in London's Army and Navy department store in 1952, Affandi has achieved global recognition as a rare original in a world where art fashion seems all too pervasive. Delighting in success, he happily toured the U.S. and Europe, but now prefers to stay home, except for occasional painting excursions to Bali. Much of his time is spent chatting with visitors in any one of five languages he has picked up in the course of his career.

His art seems an oriental counterpart to Van Gogh's; and like the European master, Affandi sometimes feels in blissful communion with nature while at other times his human passions boil up in sorrowing rage. His Javanese wife cares for his few worldly concerns and helps keep him on an even keel.

An Affandi exhibition at Djakarta this month drew a visit and some half-embarrassed criticism from Indonesia's President Sukarno. The pictures were "not ugly," Sukarno conceded, adding, "neither is the moon ugly, but it is not my world." Other critics chimed in to complain of European influences in his work.

But a friend who is also a member of Indonesia's growing creative art movement neatly defended Affandi: "It does not matter if we are entirely influenced by Europe; we will meet ourselves somewhere." The customers were pleased, bought ten out of the eleven Affandi offered for a total of about 250,000 rupiahs--or the equivalent of 15 years' middle-income salary in Djakarta.

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