Walter Spies

Dick van der Meij

Anybody interested in Bali and Balinese paintings has heard of Walter Spies (1895-1942), also an expat painter but in this case from Europe going the other way, to Indonesia. Born in Russia from German parents this ‘charismatic master escapologist and dreamer’ (p. ii) lived in Russia, the Ural, Germany, Java and finally in Bali. He was a painter, musician, architect, author, and self-taught scholar whose many interests made him the person to visit in Bali in the late 1920s and 1930s. His fame was far and wide and his paintings sold before they were even made. He was not terribly productive and the list of his works at the end of the book contains no more than 92 entries although some entries consist of more than one work. His work stands out among the work of other European artists living in Bali. It has a style all of its own internationally as well. Due to the scarcity of his work, they make now huge prized in the international art auction houses.

The first to devote much attention to Spies was Hans Rhodius who published a fat book in German in 1964: Schönheit und Reichtum des lebens, Walter Spies (Mahler und Musiker auf Bali 1895-1942). Being in German, the information in this book (which is now also extremely rare to find and costly if one does) is not easily accessible to many and that is one of the reasons for the publication of this book in English.

Spies had an interesting life and much of his activities are known through the many letters he wrote to many people, especially his mother and many reports on his doings may be found in a variety of publications. Among the Bali lovers his popularity verges on a cult. His life was indeed romantic. Born in an affluent family in Imperial Russia, interned in the Ural during the Great War, being the Court Musical Leader in the Palace of the Sultan of Yogyakarta in Central Java and finally the expert par excellence of Bali. Accused of sodomy with minors in the late 1930 and spending time in gaol after having been found guilty (mostly due to vicious gossip and the revenge of a Balinese regent, the Raja of Gianyar [p. 213]) and in the end sinking into the deep off the coast of Sumatra with the vessel Van Imhoff that was to take him to Ceylon as a German prisoner because of the Second World War, his life cannot but attract attention. And it indeed did.

Spies is said to have been extremely influential on the development of modern painting in Bali. Yet, his paintings are few and after having been made they were immediately shipped off to Europe or the United States. One wonders when the Balinese would have had the opportunity to see them, the more so since he kept his way of working secret and allowed hardly anyone into his studio.

The book is full of photographs and pictures and is a pleasure to read. The author has done his best to write as engaging as he could and he succeeded brilliantly. The book is moreover well balanced and pays its dues to all Spies’s talents which is a good thing. He was living in art not only as a painter but in many other arts as well.

Spies defies understanding. Although much is known about his activities and his paintings many questions remain. Who was he really? What did make him tick? These are questions that still remain to be answered satisfactorily after reading this book and the author is more than aware of that.

Dick van der Meij (dickvdm2005@yahoo.com)

Book Jacket

Walter Spies: A Life in Art

John Stowell
afterhoursbooks, 2012
978-602-96588-0-4

When he died 70 years ago, the artist Walter Spies was known to only a few close friends. Now he is prized as one of the finest painters of the tropical landscape. In the turmoil of war and the turbulence of the post-war years, his fate remained for a time unknown and his life and deeds in Bali gradually took on mythic proportions. He was remembered almost as a founding figure, one who had taken the arts of Bali to unprecedented heights. What remains of Walter Spies, the lasting documents of his achievement, are a mere handful of works, if we compare them with the prodigious output of many painters. He completed no more than 80 major paintings, of which only about 40 are known to still exist.
Spies’s works have always been prized by their owners and in the main they have remained in private hands. This means they were for a long time not generally well known and it has proved hard to bring them together for exhibition. However, larger exhibitions were held in the Netherlands in 1964 and again in 1980, with many works in the latter exhibition also shown in Germany.
This book presents a fully documented biography in an 80,000-word text. It places the works and related documents in chronological order and supplies a catalogue of all the known works, including mention of those that have been lost, and an analytical index. The biography, which is also available as a separate volume, traces the remarkable life of an exceptional individual whose career touched at many points the challenging issues of the first half of the twentieth century. In detention he kept up his music and painting as best he could, but lost his life when a ship taking civil internees to safety was sunk by a bomb from a ‘friendly’ reconnaissance plane. The drama of Spies’s life and the quality of his paintings are captured in the two publications of the Walter Spies Collectors Suite.

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