BRINGING THE PAST INTO THE PRESENT
ART is inherently beautiful.And art from the past contains invaluable intimations and perceptions of occasions, circumstances, and societies. I’ve always likened art institutions to marvelous time-machines, and the National Gallery Singapore remains one of my favourite portals to time-travel back into resplendent art pasts.
Under the banner of
the gallery brings to audiences two splendid shows:
and
and Born into the aristocratic Hadhrami family of Arab-Javanese descent, Raden Saleh Sjarif Boestaman was hailed as Indonesia’s pioneer modern Romantic artist. His body of works paralleled with the then-19th century romanticism which was the rage in Europe. The artist’s talent was first caught by Antoine A. J. Payen, a Belgian artist who taught the former in Bogor. Raden later obtained a grant to further his art education in Holland where his career thrived. The artist would spend the next decade in Holland, and later brought his magnificent craft to Italy, England, Belgium, France and Germany.
His signature Orientalist animal hunts and fights paintings are legendary. One primary illustration would be the largest known painting of this artist,
(1849) on display at the Gallery’s UOB Southeast Asia Gallery. This colossal painting measuring 3 by 4 metres portrays an intense scene of bulls and tigers savagely hurtled by firestorms over the brink of an abyss.
Raden Salleh was very much submerged in Western artistic sensibilities, but at the same time, many of his paintings contained clandestine ‘messages’; of inarguable love for his country and the riots warring in his own torn heart.
Juan Luna y Novicio was one of the Philippines’ most celebrated artists (there’s also Felix Resureccion Hidalgo of course, but we’ll save that for another story).A sculptor as well as a political activist, Juan Luna was inherently a patriot with a strongest sense of duty towards his own country. He also longed to show that he was just as accomplished an artist as his foreign counterparts. And that he did, splendidly.
At the 1881 Madrid Exposition of Fine Arts, Luna gifted us with
or He failed to win the gold medal (and we presume that he couldn’t have cared less) but the attention the painting brought — of renowned critics declaring in unison that the work surpassed his Spanish and Italian contemporaries — was sufficient to appease his nationalistic heart. The Filipino community in Madrid went insane with unadulterated bliss, and