1915–1999
Ida Bagus Made
Ida Bagus Made (1915–1999) grew up in Tebesaya near Ubud in a Brahman family of Balinese painters and at twenty-one joined the Pitamaha artists’ guild. His works were bought by museums in Amsterdam and Leiden, and Sukarno’s collection included his paintings. He disliked selling, however, and after 1945 hardly exhibited at all.
Biography
In 1998, after half a century without exhibitions, Ida Bagus Made agreed to a solo show at the Darga Gallery in Sanur. He attended the opening himself. The display included paintings from the Neka Museum and the Agung Rai Museum of Art and from several private collections; a short catalogue was published for the show, titled “Ida Bagus Made – Mata Air Campuhan Masa Silam” (“Ida Bagus Made: The Spring of Campuhan in Times Past”).
He was born in 1915 in Tebesaya, part of Ubud in Bali. He is also known as Ida Bagus Made Poleng and Ida Bagus Made Tebesaya, and most simply he was called Gus Made. The family was Brahman, with artistic traditions: his father, Ida Bagus Kembeng (1897–1952), painted and in 1937 won a silver medal at the International Colonial Exposition in Paris. Made was the son of his father’s second wife, Ida Ayu Rai. He began with painting and carving under his father, then studied with the Dutch painter Rudolf Bonnet, who lived in Bali. Bonnet wrote that Made was one of the most talented artists on the island. By some accounts he received no formal education and wrote only in the Balinese script.
As a teenager he caught the beginning of the modernization of Balinese art in the late 1920s. In 1936, at twenty-one, he joined the Pitamaha, an artists’ guild founded to protect Balinese art from the pressures of tourism and commercialism. Before the Second World War his works travelled to the guild’s exhibitions: to the Kunst-ring (Art Circle) of Batavia (1936, 1937, 1939), to Bandung (1936, 1938), Tegal (1938), and Medan, Palembang and Surabaya (1939).
After 1945 he stopped taking part in exhibitions.
Local people also knew him as a ritual carver: he made sacred masks for the temples around Ubud. He lived mainly off land inherited from his father, a plot of fifty ares beside his house. He treated art dealers and collectors with deep distrust, scrutinized his admirers, and few passed the test. He counted President Sukarno among them, and Sukarno’s collection included his paintings. By repute he might refuse to sell a work even for a large sum and would give it to someone he liked. Some of his pictures he wrapped up and put away.
Among his best-known works are named “Atomic War in Indra’s Heaven” (from the artist’s estate, kept at the Puri Lukisan Museum), “Dancing Leyak” and “Three Women Shape-Shifters”. His paintings are in the United Nations, the Royal Tropical Institute in Amsterdam, the Royal Ethnographic Museum in Leiden, and the Puri Lukisan, Neka, Agung Rai and Bentara Budaya museums. To my mind, the list of addresses alone says a good deal about a man who did not want to work for the market.
Family: he was married to Gusti Niang, and they had a daughter, Ida Ayu Sadri; he had no son and adopted Ida Bagus Pudja, the son of his half-brother.
Ida Bagus Made died in 1999. Following his last wish, in 2000 his widow lent more than a hundred paintings from his private collection to the Puri Lukisan Museum for safekeeping. Posthumous solo exhibitions were held in 2001 at the Herbert Johnson Museum of Art at Cornell University (Ithaca, New York; curated by Kaja McGowan; thirteen works from private collections) and in July 2008 at the Puri Lukisan, where fifty paintings from the artist’s estate were shown for the first time, under the title “Ida Bagus Made – the Art of Devotion”.
Profile notes