… in Madra’s studio in Banjar Kalah, Peliatan, before the Ramayana wayang kulit performance there on April 13.
Soemantri (left) is a volunteer curator at Ubud’s Museum Puri Lukisan, which will host the exhibition, Ketut Madra and 100 Years of Wayang Painting from October 7 to November 7, 2013. Madra’s Ramayana painting of the Sacrifice of Dewi Sita (Sita Satya) in the background is a recent work that will be in the exhibition.
Ketut Madra plays the role of Dalem, the strong, calm, quietly handsome king in the bondres performance at the Pura Dalem Gde in Peliatan. Madra’s old friend and contemporary, Ida Bagus Anom of Mas, carved and painted the dalem mask for him many years ago.
Photos by Anggara Mahendra on April 18, 2013.
I took the photos below at the odalan at the Pura Desa in Pengosekan late in 1973. The 10-year-old baris dancer, the son of Dewa Nyoman Batuan, a painter and community leader, is performing in public for the first time.
Above, the young dancer has just entered through the temple gate…
… his friends and schoolmates watch the debut from the best seats in the house…
… and he delivers a performance that is still memorable 40 years later.
I gave prints of these photos at the time to his father, and they remain my favorite series of dance pictures from that first year in Bali.
This year, the story leapt forward to the present. Dewa Batuan, the father, died in February 2013 (and is recalled here by Rio Helmi.) The dancer, Dewa Putra Yasa, now 50, learned of the photos from Rio, who’d seen them shortly after I arrived in early April. He stopped in at Ketut Madra’s Homestay to have a look at them on my iPad.
I’d never known who the old man was in the first shot watching the baris dancer enter from inside the gate. It turns out he’s Dewa Putra’s grandfather – and he taught the dance to his grandson.
Dewa Putra Yasa now has the scanned version of these old Agfa black + white prints, shot with my late lamented trusty black Nikkormat 35-mm. SLR.
First preview of an upcoming Ubud Now and Then 40-year retrospective: Rio Helmi (r. with Ketut Madra and Wayan Konderi in April 2013 leaving the Ketut Madra photo shoot, and in October 1973 (l. with Joni Patula.)
Top photo by me, bottom one by Barbara Miller
Wayang painter Ketut Madra of Peliatan prepares for a topeng tua performance at the odalan at the Pura Dalem Gde.
Photos by Anggara Mahendra on April 18, 2013.
When I arrived on April 4, Madra and his son, grandsons and close friends from the banjar were in the last stages of creating two new triangular flags or umbul-umbul for the largest temple of his village district – the Pura Dalem Gde.
Madra, who designs and outlines the motifs of all this temple’s flags, then works cooperatively with others to complete the painting, usually just before the odalan, a three-day festival held roughly every six months, begins. He allowed me to help his 11-year-old grandson finish the white highlights on the belly of the Naga (dragon-serpent) below.
And here, in another photo by Anggara Mahendra, is the same flag flying at the odalan a week later.
And here are two more, painted in earlier years. There’s a different view of these two at the entrance of the temple in the previous post. They’re all part of this temple’s extraordinary collection of painted wayang art by Ketut Madra. More on that a bit later….
I arrived in Bali on a working trip just before Kuningan, the end of the Galungan season. I figured with the major holidays over, the next three weeks would be as productive as work time gets in Bali.
That worked, sort of.
I’d forgotten that the season of odalan, three-day local temple festivals, starts in earnest in Peliatan right after Galungan. The most important temple in Madra’s banjar, Pura Dalem Gde di Peliatan, was one of them. The next few posts capture some of the events there.
Here’s the main gate of the inner temple on the third day of the odalan. All the umbul-umbul, triangular temple flags on bamboo poles, were designed and painted by Ketut Madra.
This photo and the one in the earlier Ramayana wayang kulit post are by Anggara Mahendra (there will be a link to his web site when he finishes it!).
Rio Helmi arrived at Ketut Madra’s studio on Monday, April 8, to shoot Madra at work for the September 2013 issue of Departures.
I hadn’t seen Rio for 40 years; and while he and Madra had met more recently, it had still been awhile for both of them, too.
On Saturday, April 13, Ketut Madra and I, together with family and guests, celebrated conclusion of our agreement to mount the exhibition Ketut Madra and 100 Years of Wayang Painting at the Museum Puri Lukisan in Ubud. The opening will be on October 7, 2013, and the exhibition will run through November 7.
The occasion called for a Ramayana shadow play or wayang kulit performance at Madra’s home that night. “The Abduction of Dewi Sita” was the story for the evening, with Wayan Deres as dalang and Madra’s younger brother, Ketut Madri, as one of the two gender wayang musicians. It felt like exactly the right choice for a story as the chosen scenes show up in about half a dozen paintings in the show. Here, the great bird Jatayu flies to attempt to rescue Sita from the clutches of the demon king Rawana.
The Museum Puri Lukisan in Ubud has invited me to curate an October 2013 exhibition of Balinese wayang painting from 1900 to the present.
I’m returning to Bali on April 4 to work out the details and visit the collections of other Balinese museums from which we hope to borrow pieces of wayang art to supplement the 60 paintings we already have from Ketut Madra’s and my collections.
Below: Hanoman and Sangyang Surya by Ketut Madra. Acrylic paint on canvas, 54.5 x 44 cm., 1972
The first exhibition of this work took place 40 years ago at Harvard University’s Fogg Art Museum in the summer of 1974. Here’s the Boston Globe review of that show:
The Boston Globe, July 28, 1974
Exhibition breathes the life force
by ROBERT TAYLOR
“The Legendary Paintings of Bali” – actually 19 paintings, three drawings, five masks, three knives, two small ivory carvings, two sculptures and two shadow puppets of translucent buffalo parchment – at Cambridge’ s Fogg Art Museum through August comprise what is in all probability the first U.S. exhibition of Balinese art.
The Netherlands, thanks to old colonial ties, has experienced the art and culture of Bali and from time to time occasional pieces dot the Western scene; but, small as it may appear, the Fogg show, mostly on loan from David M. Irons is a rarity. It has been arranged in three rooms following the layout of a Balinese temple. The traditions and ties of the island of Bali are, of course, Hindu. While Islam has triumphed in the rest of Indonesia, Bali remains the only part of the archipelago still subscribing to Hindu beliefs, which traveled to Java and mingled with the island legends and animistic worldview about the year 1200. Thus, the ‘temple’ format of the exhibition roughly observes a progress from the least sacred, or southern section of the temple, to the holier precincts, which face northeast.
What you will find in the southernmost room are depictions of gods and heroes in their violent manifestations. They are figures with several heads or arms, a distinct advantage in any sort of combat, but at the same time these peevish gods and valiant warriors are comic. Magical though they may be, art itself presents a point-of-view toward them. The gods of ancient Greece in their all-too-human failings suggest the qualities of their Balinese counterparts. Brahma and Vishnu are quarreling, for example, and like rabid pagodas, have assumed protective stances – actually the fearsome ‘pamurtian’ guise in which they multiply in pyramidal forms – but Shiva, between them, robed in a golden aura, spreads to the edge of the universe, shaming the others and making them aware of their bluster.
If the demonic and the marvelous fill this room, the middle room is largely devoted to the turbulent Hindu epics of the Ramayana and the Mahabharata. Hanuman, the divine monkey, slays the naga, or serpent. Sita is abducted by Ravana. In a charming touch, a large painting, flanked by the actual puppets, depicts a Balinese “dalang,” or puppet- master, enthralling an audience with a shadow play of the Ramayana.
Finally one finds the Balinese cosmology given quieter and more meditative aspects. The third room is by and large metaphysical. A schematic map of the gods places Sanghyang Widi, the unmoved mover, at the center of the universe, the one god who sets the eternal dance in motion. (I trust that the cosmic scheme of things will survive the frisky description of the chakra of Vishnu as “the disc at the top which resembles a spiked Frisbee with razors’ edge.”). But this room also contains the dance masks with their conventions such as the graceful arch for the eyes of the aristocrats and potato noses for the clowns.
The paintings range from the last 120 years to the moment, and among the features of the show is the element of contrast between the old-time wayang painters of legend and moderns like Ketut Madra who follow the traditional imagery, but who employ contemporary materials.
The ancient methods use ground pigments mixed with limewater and a fish-based glue. Cotton cloth, on which the picture is done, first gets prepared with a rice paste, then dried in the sun. Polished with shells, the cloth is draped in the lap of the artist, who works with six basic colors: red from imported Chinese vermillion, yellow from clay, blue from indigo, ochre from native rock, black from lamp soot, white from calcinated pig bone.
Line controls form in Balinese art. The quality of the line derives much of its subtle character from a pointed bamboo stylus; in any case, drawing is fundamental. This show raises original stylistic issues, which have been little explored, in particular the relationships between Balinese art and the styles of Tibetan Mahayana work; and the masks which bear an affinity to the Japanese Noh drama. Some pieces such as the “langsé,” or temple hangings, suggest ideas in contemporary Western art (the desire to close the gap between craft and high art, the use of textured floral contrast, the incorporation of objects, such as pierced coins, which suspend one of the hangings.
There is a single cloth scroll, faded by the southeast trades and the southwest monsoon winds: no one tries to preserve Balinese art. From our Western point of view it is unfortunate; but the Balinese do not substitute art for religion as Western man has sometimes sought to do, and their art is not mummified but intended for the experience of being alive.
Bali Arts 