I Gusti Nyoman Lempad

Biography

Nobody knows Lempad’s date of birth, as is the case for many Balinese of his time. The year usually given is 1862, with Bedulu (Bedahulu) as the place of birth; the dating cannot be taken further than a single year. There is an indirect marker: when Krakatoa erupted in 1883, he was already married.

He grew up under the eye of his father, who was also an artist.

Lempad was not taught to read: the school he attended was informal, and he never learned. The only thing he could write was his own name, and he signed his pictures with it. According to some accounts, a Brahmin taught him to draw. He was recognised early as a stone carver and as an architect (in Balinese such a master builder is called an undagi). He worked in Ubud at the court of the rulers of the Sukawati family, building palaces and temples in the town itself and in nearby villages. Of what he built, the Saraswati water temple survives, not far from the Puri Lukisan Museum in Ubud, and even today it shows his sense of construction and composition. According to some accounts, he met the German artist Walter Spies at about the age of forty, and this changed his life. Lempad became friends with him and helped build Spies’s house in Campuhan, not far from his own. It seems that the part of his work for which he is known as a draughtsman began after that, though I cannot name the moment when he took up ink and paper: there are no documents. In 1936 Lempad, together with the Dutch artist Rudolf Bonnet and members of the Sukawati princely house, became one of the founders of the artists’ association Pita Maha, set up to improve the work of its members. His drawings were shown in exhibitions in Amsterdam, Tokyo and Paris.

In his later years he made hundreds of line drawings: the epic Ramayana, Balinese folk tales and myths. His line is dense and fine; he himself, as people remembered, did not seek profit from the drawings and gladly gave them to admirers.

He died at home in Ubud at the end of April 1978. The story goes that he gathered his family, asked them to bathe him, and died; the Balinese believed that he had chosen the day himself, as the most sacred. The Australian filmmakers John Darling and Lorne Blair made a short documentary, “Lempad of Bali”, about the last days of Lempad and his cremation.

Lempad’s drawings are kept in his house museum in Ubud, in the Neka Art Museum, in the Denpasar Arts Centre, and also in the Tropenmuseum in Amsterdam, in the national museum of ethnology in Leiden and in the Museum der Kulturen in Basel. The Balinese artists’ association Sanggar Dewata Indonesia named a prize after him, which is awarded to people who care for Balinese art.