Pretty

What was it about Picasso? Or Sudjojono? Some time in the early 1950s, when Sudjojono was not yet 40, he decided to do something unusual: He and other artists rode their motorbikes from Yogya to Jakarta. Their aim was to convince President Sukarno to agree to the idea of Sticusa, the Dutch foundation for cultural cooperation, to mount a large exhibition of 20th-century European painters: Picasso, Matisse, Braque.

I found this story in the account of Willem Mooijman who was working at Sticusa at the time, as retold in an interesting book about the history of art and culture in Indonesia between 1950 and 1965, Heirs to World Culture, edited by Jennifer Lindsay and Maya H.T. Liem.

September 20, 2016