Lot Essay

When Sudjana Kerton (1922-1994) returned from over 25 years of living in the West to his native Indonesia in 1976, he found himself an artistic outsider in a way that may be familiar to many who have returned home after a long exodus – reminiscent of Raden Saleh’s (c1811-1880) return from Europe in 1851. Out of kilter with the young Indonesian artists graduating from the art schools of Yogyakarta and Bandung, and the thrust of the conceptualism and material experimentation of the Gerakan Seni Rupa Baru (New Art Movement), Kerton held onto his means of expression through figuration and painting. He resisted the call to abstraction, mixed media or dematerialisation of the art object. He was redolent of his generation of modern masters and Indonesian nationalists – the world of his friends and colleagues Sudjojono, Hendra and Affandi – and still had more to say about everyday life, the street, and cameo moments that he resurrected from drawings, memories, and the visible world that he once again was able to observe at first hand.

His presence has been resurrected in recent decades as the lacuna that resulted from his years overseas has been partially closed with references in academic research and representation in international exhibitions. As far back as 1994, Julie Ewington commented in her review of The First Queensland Art Gallery Asia-Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art that Kerton's two works in the exhibition were not enough to represent an artist of his calibre – "such a lively and influential Indonesian painter."¹

Like his modernist colleague Hendra Gunawan, Kerton painted snatched moments. Familiar to generations of children in Indonesia, Balloon Seller, 1984, captures the moment the seller inflates a red balloon as children gather round in joy. This is living heritage, one that many Indonesians from all backgrounds can recall:

When we were kids we'd always wait for the balloon seller. Balloons are cheap, affordable for all. Even if you come from a rich family you still love to buy balloons. They would come in the afternoon, every day, shouting 'balon, balon', going to every street and around schools for the children to hear.²

Sellers in today's kampongs have helium to inflate their balloons but there is resonance even to a 21^st century audience; Kerton captures the ultimate simplicity of joyful entertainment brought to the street by nothing more than a man peddling his wares.

Mencari Kutu, or Picking Lice, comes from the same period. Painted in 1985, it again shows a scene that would have been widely seen, particularly in Indonesian villages where people would groom each other rather than going to a hair salon. Kerton is not the only Indonesian artist to do this, with the oil painting Delousing by Hendra from 1954 standing as a well-documented example.³ It also links indirectly to genre scene painting from much earlier periods in European art, as seen in work by Dutch artists such as Pieter de Hooch, who painted the Rijksmuseum favourite, A Mother's Duty in c.1658-1660.⁴

One of Kerton's trademark motifs is cats, and in both paintings we see a stray typical of the street cats that abound in the physical environment of working people's lives. While a dog is more of a status symbol as an animal that has to be purchased and licensed, a cat signifies ordinary working people. Kerton uses this signifier as a social indicator but also a realist take on scenes that he observed. However, he makes no attempt to make mimetic works. Imagination is the tool he uses to get close to reality. In an interview with Astri Wright, he made this clear:

In my work, I am not looking for anatomy – I am looking for expression. Of course, you must study! Psychology…people's everyday life…and you must think. Just like making bread – you work it over before you bake it. Then the result will be more beautiful than external reality…Say a painter wants to paint a beautiful flower which he saw outside. But someone says: 'It doesn't look like the real flower.' But of course! He made that flower, not from nature, but from his mind.⁵

Balloon Seller and Picking Lice are a pair of scenes that capture the essence of everyday life and are representative of his later career after returning to Indonesia. They are a close-up example of the type of anecdotal detail seen in teeming variety in Village Life, 1981, which stands as the current auction record for Kerton (sold at Sotheby’s Hong Kong in 2014 for a premium-inclusive HKD11m/ US$1.418m). Whether pertaining to traditional Indonesian performative art forms, as seen in Wayang Golek, 1982 (sold for HKD4.925m/ US$627,449 at Christie's Hong Kong in 2019), or ceremonies like Nyawer (Traditional Sundanese Wedding), 1988 (sold for SGD 719,000/ US$462,619 at Borobudur Fine Art, Singapore in 2014), or a wry nod to what he observed as an ex-pat in New York in Punk Rock, 1984 (sold for HK$ 2.68m/ US$345,452 at Sotheby’s Hong Kong in 2014), Kerton was a 20^th century observer of life who brought a degree of levity to his expressive artworks.⁶ The good-humoured edge seen in the compositions of his later career was a long way from where he started. Born in 1922, Kerton worked as an illustrator and journalist at the Patriot military magazine and Orientasi, where he worked on stories of both political importance and the everyday.⁷ When sketching as a war artist and portraitist for these publications, he was obliged to work very quickly, and so brought the animator’s sense of the essence to his work. His early works rarely survive, having been created during the Japanese occupation of Indonesia and the Dutch attempts to regain control from 1945 to 1949. He lived in Yogyakarta during the latter period, and co-founded with Hendra, Affandi and others the Pelukis Rakyat (Frontline Painters) in 1945.⁸ Recording President Sukarno's leadership, his decades of life overseas and formal art training began once the conflict with the Dutch had ended.

Leaving Indonesia in 1950, he went to study in Holland on a Dutch government scholarship established as part of the STICUSA (Foundation for Cultural Cooperation between Indonesia and Holland) initiative. After further travel in Paris, he migrated to the United States and went on to take up a scholarship at the Art Students' League in New York.⁹ A trip to Mexico in 1963 and seeing the work of Diego Rivera and Rufina Tamayo resulted in changes that could be seen from then onwards, with the reduction of form and brightening of the palette. He left the United States in 1976 and lived the rest of his life at the house and studio he built in a remote, mountainous site outside Bandung.

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¹Julie Ewington, 'Exhibitions', Art and Asia Pacific, Vol 1, Iss.2, 1 April 1994, p.12
²Daniel Komala, interview 19.2.25
³Claire Holt, Art in Indonesia, Plate 167, p.222. Referenced by Astri Wright, Soul, Spirit, and Mountain, p.190, footnote 13. The painting is in the Presidential Collection, Jakarta.
⁴In the collection of the Amsterdam Museum, on loan to the Rijksmuseum.
⁵Astri Wright, Soul, Spirit, and Mountain, 1994, p.193
⁶Artprice. Data for Sudjana Kerton (1922-1994). Accessed 3 March 2025. http://www.artprice.com/.
⁷Ibid. p.186.
⁸Ibid, p.184.
⁹Ibid, p.188.

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Bibliography

Artprice. Data for Sudjana Kerton (1922-1994). Accessed 3 March 2025. http://www.artprice.com/.
Ewington, Julie. 'Exhibitions: A Moment in a Journey The First Queensland Art Gallery Asia-Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art', Art and AsiaPacific, New York, Vol 1. Iss.2 (1 April 1994): 10-14.
Holt, Claire (1967). Art in Indonesia: Continuities and Change. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press.
Wright, Astri (1994). Soul, Spirit, and Mountain: Preoccupations of Contemporary Indonesian Painters. Kuala Lumpur: Oxford University Press.