Stedelijk Studies Journal Issue #14
Zaritsky/Rusli
A Multidirectional Approach to Curating International Modern Art
by Kerstin Winking
A Multidirectional Approach to Curating International Modern Art
by Kerstin Winking
September 23, 2024
This comparative historical case study starts in the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam in the 1950s, where the Israeli artist Joseph Zaritsky (1891–1985) and the Indonesian artist Rusli (1912–2005)[2] presented their work from September 15 to October 12, 1955, as part of 5 generaties (5 generations), a curatorial framework conceptualized under museum director Willem Sandberg. The title 5 generaties encompassed several displays of modern and contemporary art presented in the Stedelijk between 1946 and the 1960s, all of which narrated art historically how generations of artists captured the spirit of the time (Zeitgeist).[3] In 1954, Sandberg met Zaritsky during a trip to Israel, where the painter lived and worked. Zaritsky was one of the founders of New Horizons, an influential organization that promoted Israeli modern art. Rusli came to Amsterdam in 1954 on a study trip sponsored by the Dutch Stichting voor Culturele Samenwerking (Foundation for Cultural Cooperation, Sticusa).[4] In the 1940s, he had been a member of Seniman Indonesia Muda (Young Indonesian Artists, SIM), a group of Yogyakarta-based artists formed during the Indonesian Revolution (1945–1949), in which Indonesians defended themselves from a Dutch recolonization attempt. By the time of the exhibition, Sandberg was widely known for his engagement with international modern and contemporary art and for his involvement with the Dutch resistance during the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands (1940–1945) during World War II.
Taking the art historical event of Zaritsky/Rusli as a starting point, this case study explores how Sandberg’s curatorial practice provides an occasion to recall the mid-1950s as an era of postwar internationalism in Amsterdam and its relationship with modernism in new nations like Israel and Indonesia (fig. 1). Inspired by the multidirectional memory model introduced by Michael Rothberg, I ask how Sandberg’s curatorial practice imagined the spirit of the time by exhibiting the work of Rusli and Zaritsky, both makers of memories captured in drawings and paintings of specific sites, crafted in specific styles and techniques. Rothberg introduced the multidirectional memory model in response to scholars in his field who perceived the memory of colonialism and the Holocaust—the genocide of European Jews masterminded by German Nazis—as competing over space in the urban public sphere of Washington, D.C., in the twenty-first century. It presupposes that such memories should not be competing for space and attention but should be analyzed in a relationship marked by a “productive, intercultural dynamic” that can create “new forms of solidarity and new visions of justice.”[5] Although Rothberg wrote his book more than fifty years after Zaritstky/Rusli, I propose that Sandberg’s involvement with Zaritsky and Rusli is based on a similar but less articulated belief in the ability of the modern art museum to create international solidarities and modernist visions of justice.
Figure 1. Willem Sandberg, Zaritsky/Rusli, 1955, exhibition poster, 100 × 71 cm. Collection Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam.
The memory of the Holocaust and the Indonesian Revolution was only beginning to crystallize in the 1950s. Sandberg took the opportunity to make international modern art in the public sphere of the Stedelijk a part of this process. He had seen how fascist nationalism had become a deadly threat to internationalism in modern art when the National Socialist Party grabbed power in Germany. After World War II, informed by his leftist egalitarian internationalist perspective, Sandberg took his leadership of the Stedelijk as an opportunity to empower his version of international modernism through his curatorial practice.[6] Rejecting his aristocratic background, he preferred to think of artists (and himself) as international working-class people. He thought of Vincent van Gogh as “the first socialist artist,” because the latter “understood what the equality of the human was” and “lived the life of a worker.” Mondriaan he viewed as “socially engaged” and “conscious of the working class.”[7]
Considered within the wider sociocultural context of the Netherlands in the 1950s, Zaritsky/Rusli also resonates with what Iris Van Ooijen and Ilse Raaijmakers described as the “recurring phenomenon in [the] postwar history of comparisons of atrocities during World War II and the Indonesian Revolution.”[8] Although the works of Zaritsky and Rusli do not visualize the atrocities of these wars, Zaritsky/Rusli nevertheless relates to this phenomenon in the Netherlands because, in the museum, the artists are understood as representatives of the newcomer nations formed in the direct aftermath of the Holocaust in the Middle East (Israel) and Dutch colonialism in Asia (Indonesia). Therefore, the exhibition lends itself to an art historical study inspired by the multidirectional memory model, which enables both remembrance and reflection on the effects of fascism and colonialism on the display and collecting of international modern art in Amsterdam in the 1950s.
Zaritsky/Rusli took place in the broader curatorial framework of 5 generaties, introduced by Sandberg in 1946 to exhibit the Stedelijk’s collection in a format destined to provide the exhibition visitor insight into the development of modern art since 1800.[9] In 1951, Sandberg started to make the static display more dynamic by using one or more rooms for small-scale solo presentations. Zaritsky’s and Rusli’s were solo exhibitions organized in connection with each other.[10] Each artist had their own catalogue and exhibition rooms, but they shared the poster and opening date, and the exhibited drawings and paintings had various similarities in terms of artistic techniques, materials, approach, and subject matter (figs. 2–6). The aesthetic similarities partly explain Sandberg’s decision to introduce the artists to the Stedelijk’s audience together. Moreover, the curatorial pairing of the artists demonstrated to the museum’s audience what Sandberg’s equated vision of international modern art entailed.[11] As my historical contextualization inspired by the multidirectional model of the artist’s visual memories demonstrates, the apparently equilibrated curatorial international modern art pairing is politically deeply conflicted.
Figure 2. Gallery view of Zaritsky at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam in 1955. Photo: Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam.
Figure 3. Gallery view of Rusli at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam in 1955. Photo: Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam.
Figure 4. Gallery view of Rusli at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam in 1955. Photo: Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam.
Figure 5. Gallery view of Rusli at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam in 1955. Photo: Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam.
Figure 6. Gallery view of Rusli at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam in 1955. Photo: Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam.
Exhibiting the work of Indonesian and Israeli artists aligns with Sandberg’s internationalism and leftist egalitarianism, which became a driving force for his work after World War II and his firsthand experience of fascist terror, which he barely survived and which many of his friends in the resistance—Jewish people or political dissidents—did not.[12] Sandberg was schooled in Marxist theory and presumably identified with what Nazi ideologues like Alfred Rosenberg would reject as Kulturbolschewist (Cultural Bolshevik), a pejorative term that the Nazis used when Jewish or fremdrassig (belonging to a foreign race) people seemed inapplicable. In her extensive study of National Socialist art discourse, Dina Kashapova substantiates how “the Marxist catchphrase internationalism becomes a characteristic of the enemy camp in National Socialism.”[13] In völkisch circles, the term “international” became almost synonymous with French or Jewish, even though art could never have been any of that. Under the Nazi regime, German art had to be cleansed of any Jewish or French influence, as demonstrated by the Entartete Kunst (Degenerate Art, 1937) exhibition and the burning of thousands of modernist paintings in Berlin (1939) and Paris (1941).[14]
One of Sandberg’s resistance companions and a survivor of Nazi persecution was Jan Romein. During the German occupation, Sandberg and Romein frequently discussed the future of the Netherlands in secret meetings.[15] After World War II, Sandberg’s resistance network brought him in contact with supporters of the Indonesian decolonization movement in the Netherlands. When the Indonesian artists Agus Djaya and Otto Djaya came to Amsterdam in 1947, Sandberg reacted quickly and provided them with rooms in the Stedelijk to display their work, despite the obvious political topicality of doing so when the Netherlands and Indonesia were at war.[16] The Djayas had found support in Dutch leftist circles, for instance with Romein, but also with Willem Wertheim,[17] who in 1948 publicly compared Rosenberg’s “myth of Aryan superiority” to a Dutch “specter in the form of the colonial mentality, unconsciously looking down on the dark-colored Indonesian peoples.”[18] Wertheim considered the myth of Aryan superiority and colonial mentality as equally evil specters of the past in the present. In Dutch leftist circles, international cultural cooperation was seen as a way to expel these ghosts.
Figure 7. Joseph Zaritsky, Blumen, 1951, oil on canvas, 183 × 200 cm. Collection Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam.
In 1948, Sandberg saw his internationalist view of modern art confirmed at the first postwar Venice Biennale, which restarted after the fascist terror in Europe and of which the “defining feature, both promising and problematic, [was] internationalization.”[19] The year 1948 was also one of continued conflict between Israelis and Arabs in the Palestinian region, the Nakba, and the declaration of the state of Israel without defined borders.[20] The Venice Biennale offered a welcome opportunity to instrumentalize art to support the formation of the Israeli state internationally. As Yigal Zalmona explains, “Following the Holocaust, the sizable participation of Jewish artists from the land of Israel had great symbolic meaning.”[21] Among the Israeli artists, this symbolic meaning was conflicted, and out of the differences that arose between them over their participation in the Biennale, the New Horizons group of artists emerged in 1948 with Zaritsky as one of its leaders.[22] In 1952, Israel added its national pavilion to the Giardini del Castello,[23] and in 1954, Sandberg decided to bring the Israeli submission to the Biennale to the Stedelijk under the title israëlische kunst.[24] Sandberg was impressed by the artists from Israel and went on a work trip to Israel in 1954, where he visited Zaritsky in his studio in Tel Aviv and bought the oil painting Blumen (1951) (fig. 7) and seven watercolors (1936–1948) for the Stedelijk’s collection (figs. 8–14).
Figure 8. Joseph Zaritsky, Composition, 1936, watercolor on paper, 50 × 71 cm. Collection Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam.
Figure 9. Joseph Zaritsky, View Through the Window, 1936, watercolor on paper, 51 × 70 cm. Collection Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam.
Figure 10. Joseph Zaritsky, Landscape, 1936, watercolor on paper, 54 × 76 cm. Collection Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam.
Figure 11. Joseph Zaritsky, Composition, 1940, watercolor on paper, 55 × 75 cm. Collection Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam.
Figure 12. Joseph Zaritsky, Landscape, 1946, watercolor on paper, 37 × 55 cm. Collection Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam.
Figure 13. Joseph Zaritsky, Composition, 1946, watercolor on paper, 37 × 55 cm. Collection Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam.
Figure 14. Joseph Zaritsky, Composition, 1948, watercolor on paper, 37 × 55 cm. Collection Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam.
As the invitation circulated by Kunstzaal Plaats in the Hague states, the Indonesian artist and art teacher Rusli was in the Netherlands on a study trip to Western Europe “under the auspices” of Sticusa and showed his work in the gallery in 1954.[25] In July 1955, a letter on behalf of Sticusa to Sandberg inquired about a possible exhibition of Rusli’s work in the Stedelijk. Referring to earlier conversations with Sandberg and Hans Jaffé about an exhibition of Rusli’s work in the museum, Sticusa asked Sandberg to contact Rusli directly and provided his address in Italy, where the artist stayed in July 1955 (fig. 15).[26] Sandberg wrote to Rusli a few days later, inviting him to show his work in the museum from mid-September for three to four weeks.[27] Unfortunately, all that seems to remain of Rusli’s exhibition in Amsterdam is the correspondence between the exhibition organizers, several drafts of the exhibition list, a six-page exhibition catalogue, the exhibition poster, and a few black-and-white photographs. None of Rusli’s works were acquired or given to the museum collection.
Figure 15. Rusli, Rome (St. Peter’s Basilica), 1956, watercolor on paper, 29 × 39.5 cm. Collection Oei Hong Djien Museum, Magelang.
The absence of work by Rusli in the Stedelijk’s collection is regrettable, because it would have enriched the museum’s collection with evidence of its affiliation with this cosmopolitan modernist. However, using the multidirectional memory model as inspiration for this revisionist art historical study enables an analysis of the art of Rusli and Zaritsky on equal terms, despite the absence of Rusli’s work from the Stedelijk’s collection, by reconnecting the museum to its past solidarity with modernists from Indonesia through the concept of memory rather than through physical evidence. The reasons for the absence of Rusli’s work from the Stedelijk’s collection remain unproved here. Still, the absence is striking because reviews of Rusli’s work were generally positive.[28] In Algemeen Handelsblad, F. P. Huygens notes that the artist had studied in Santiniketan and ascertained a “cosmopolitan character” in his work, which he attributes to its “typical Eastern hallmarks” along with its adherence to “the Western plastic principle.”[29] Huygens draws parallels between Rusli’s work and Chinese painting and Cézanne’s modulation principle, and identifies “a spiritual-painterly technique of which this artist certainly knows the secret.” Recognizing Rusli’s significant talent, Huygens detects a characteristic form of expression that unites East and West in the artist’s works.
Born in Medan, Sumatra, in 1912, Rusli was first educated at Dutch schools in Sumatra and later at Taman Siswa schools in Java. He then studied at Kala Bhavana, the art school in Santiniketan, India. His educational trajectory is closely related to the pedagogical decolonization movement in early twentieth-century colonial Indonesia and India. The pedagogical concept for the Taman Siswa school in colonial Indonesia came from Soewardi Soerjaningrat (since 1928 known as Ki Hadjar Dewantara), who was inspired by the pedagogy of Maria Montessori and Rabindranath Tagore (fig. 16).[30] A specific goal important to Soerjaningrat and Tagore was to educate the Asian Indigenous youth to become independent-minded individuals with a sense of community. In 1927, Tagore visited Soerjaningrat in Yogyakarta and invited him to send Taman Siswa students for further study to Visva-Bharati, the educational complex he founded in Santiniketan. In 1932, Rusli became one of these students. He attended the Kala Bhavana until 1938 and studied painting, dance, literature, and art philosophy with Indian modernist artists like Abanindranath Tagore, Nandalal Bose, and Ramkinkar Baij.
Figure 16. Chris Lebeau, Soewardi [Soerjaningrat], May 23, 1919, wood engraving on newsprint, 16.1 × 12.4 cm. Collection Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam.
As the director of the Kala Bhavana, Bose implemented a visual art curriculum in line with Tagore’s pedagogy that emphasized individual freedom and self-expression, harmony with the community and environment, and a pan-Asian outlook.[31] “Eastern artists,” Bose wrote, use “schemata,” that is, “analogies in structure, movement, character,” as “a method for storing in their minds the forms of things.”[32] In Santiniketan, Rusli learned to observe his art’s subject matter carefully and then identify and devise schemata using various art techniques. How to paint, draw, or otherwise give shape to the schemata was part of the extensive practical training that covered line, color, shading, detailing, highlighting, and composition on different materials, including paper, silk, murals, or banners. Experimentation with various, primarily local (Asian) artistic methods, tools, and techniques was encouraged.
Upon returning to Yogyakarta in 1938, Rusli worked as a teacher at the Taman Siswa, and from circa 1945 onward he temporarily applied his skills and art pedagogy to serve the accelerated struggle against the Dutch recolonization of Indonesia. In 1938, large parts of the future Republic of Indonesia were still under Dutch colonial control, but World War II and the Japanese occupation (1942–1945), the national movement, growing demands for independence, and the Indonesian Revolution (1945–1949) would soon change that. As a patriot, Rusli was a member of SIM in the 1940s.[33] However, based on what he had learned about artistic freedom and independence of thought and the critical attitude toward Japanese nationalism in Santiniketan, Rusli insisted on his modernist autonomy but was also engaged within the artist community as a friend, fellow artist, and art teacher. His work has a strong connection with traditional culture and Indonesia as the location where he spent most of his life. Toward the end of the revolution, in 1949, his name, a short biography, and a reproduction of one of his drawings, Kaliurang, appeared in Brochure Kesenian (fig. 17).[34] The watercolor or ink drawing is named after a small resort town in the region of Yogyakarta, where the Dutch military had dropped bombs earlier that year but which had come to peace by the end of it. It is typical of Rusli’s work insofar as it depicts a visual memory of the landscape of his abode and his aesthetic experience of the environment.
Figure 18. Rusli, Tree and House, 1953, oil on canvas, 102 x 84 cm. Cemara 6 – Toeti Heraty Museum, Jakarta.
At present, within and outside of Indonesia, paintings by Rusli from the 1950s are rarely visible in modern art museum displays, making Tree and House (1953) in the Toeti Heraty Museum in Jakarta an exception (fig. 18). What makes this painting an aesthetic delight is the spontaneous concentration with which Rusli translated his observation and sensation into purposeful brushstrokes that aim to capture the forms of objects as well as the atmosphere of the scenery at a specific time and place. Drawing the “structure and characteristics of plants and trees,” as Rusli did with Tree and House, was part of the curriculum at the Kala Bhavana.[35] Therefore, Tree and House appears as an example of the work he would produce following Bose’s advice to “work daily, experiment continuously, and avoid both timidity and over-ambition. An artist should try to express only the little he has really experienced.”[36] In that way, the artwork becomes a memory of an experience of a specific time, place, and style. Rusli’s signature, the date, and the stamp of his thumbprint indicate when this particular experience of his environment occurred. Often, he would add the name of the location where he made the drawing, but not in Tree and House. That the painting depicts a scene in Java is indicated through the architectural schemata of vernacular houses. In that way, the environment shown in Tree and House expresses traditional Javanese culture indeed with an Eastern cosmopolitan modernist aesthetic.
By the time Sandberg met with Zaritsky in Tel Aviv in 1954, the artist had established his position as a leader of the Israeli modernist movement in which he had taken part since escaping anti-Jewish pogroms in Ukraine and emigrating from Kyiv to Jerusalem in 1923.[37] Zaritsky was born in 1891 in a small town near Kyiv, where he moved in 1910 and attended the Kyiv Art School of Painting, Drawing, and Architecture before he was conscripted into the Russian army during World War I. In Kyiv he became acquainted with art practices in the city at a time when Pavel Chistyakov’s pedagogic ideals of “disengaging students from dogmatism” had inspired many artists.[38] Specifically, the work of the painter Mikhail Vrubel made a stark impression on him. In his study of Zaritsky’s sources, Igor Aronov compellingly argues that the “mosaic-like… tessera-like faceted touches” of some of Vrubel’s oil paintings resonated in Zaritsky’s watercolors, where the “mosaic technique” became “the means for expressing his artistic perception of reality.”[39] Aronov also notes a change in technique when Zaritsky moved to Israel in 1923, where in his landscapes he no longer “covered almost the entire surface with paint” but leaves “light areas” where the paper shines through.
That the move to Jerusalem impacted Zaritsky’s landscapes and cityscapes seems only natural considering that he attempted to capture the “climate” or the “atmosphere of a place” in his art, and given that he also had to establish his position in the local art scene of the 1920s.[40] In this regard, his paradoxical attitude toward the notion of Yisraeliut (“Israelness”) is interesting. On the one hand, Zaritsky thought this notion tied artists to “symbols,” “specificity,” and “provincialism,” while the “language” of his art was universal.[41] On the other hand, he aimed to capture what he saw as the specific “climate” of Israel, perceptible in its “dynamism and the light.”[42] In this way, Zaritsky’s landscape paintings and drawings—like Rusli’s—are visual memories of a specific time and place, crafted with an idiosyncratic style rooted in his education and ideology. Zaritsky distinguished himself from other Jewish artists through his artistic orientation toward the West, which he had developed in Kyiv and emphasized throughout his career. His universalist “language” was a way of relating to French expressionist artists like Henry Matisse, whose work Zaritsky saw when he traveled to Paris in 1927. Zaritsky moved from Jerusalem to Tel Aviv two years later, where he built his studio and established his career over the 1930s and ’40s.
When Sandberg visited his studio in 1954, Zaritsky had become a renowned artist whose work was widely exhibited in Israel and had been shown at the Biennale in 1948. He was also well-known as the leader of the Association of Painters and Sculptors, out of which New Horizons emerged after the Biennale. The New Horizons artists dominated the Israeli modern art scene until circa 1960.[43] Zaritsky saw art as a personal statement and himself as a producer of art for art’s sake, often depicting the act of painting itself and pushing the other New Horizons artists “toward abstract art for art’s sake” in the 1950s.[44] Nevertheless, as Holocaust survivor and director of the Tel Aviv Museum, Eugen Kolb, concludes, because of the artist’s perceived connection with “French art,” Zaritsky’s paintings always were anchored in the “concrete… impression of a landscape.”[45] Kolb also stresses the emphasis Zaritsky put on the autonomy of the artist when he writes that “Zaritsky’s work is like a delicate flower, always nourished by the same fertile soil: the personality of the creator.” Kolb’s statement emphasizes the artist’s modernist insistence on autonomy, and may have been a decisive criterion for Sandberg’s acquisition of Zaritsky’s oil painting Blumen (Flowers, 1951) for the Stedelijk’s collection.
Despite Zaritsky’s self-representation as an apolitical artist, Zalmona compellingly demonstrates that his privileging of French art was related to a broader political orientation toward Paris as “a symbol of the free France that overcame Nazi oppression” and his “Israeli-Zionist gaze.”[46] This affiliation with French art stems as much from an ideological positioning toward the West (away from Germany) as from an ideological distancing from the East.[47] Zalmona illuminates this in his contextualization of Zaritsky as a crucial figure in the Israeli art canon:
This period’s affinity to Western art also reflected the ongoing tendency of Jews, and specifically Jewish intellectuals, in the Land of Israel to respond to tension with the Arab world by rejecting the East. […] In other words, the bonding of Israel and international art coincided with a geographical process from which Israel emerged as [a] Western state at war with the other nations in the Middle East. […] True to the tradition of disregarding the East, Zaritsky had overlooked the remnants of abandoned Palestinian homes….”[48]
Thus, Zaritsky’s land- and cityscapes resonate with the Zionist belief that, in the Palestinian-American philosopher Edward Said’s words, “Their coming to Palestine turned an ‘empty’ desert land into a garden.”[49] In the same article, Said assesses “the art of memory” by reflecting on the elusiveness of the concept, delineating memory critically as prone to invention and as essentially political. His strongest example concerns the memory of the people of Palestine, who nationalist Zionists have not only expelled from their land but whose memory they attempted to erase from history. Over the course of his career, Zaritsky visualized this process. Aronov identifies the emptiness in Zaritsky’s watercolor landscapes as “a change of style,” where “light areas” appear after his move to Jerusalem in 1923. Later, Zaritsky continued the development of his abstract art “language” and employed it to overwrite the Palestinian region with his Israeli international modernist style.
Dutch journalists reviewed the land- and cityscapes of Zaritsky and Rusli along the formalist lines of internationalist modern art and without references to the recent Dutch recolonization attempt of the archipelago or the displacement of the Palestinian people from the land they had inhabited for hundreds of years. The three writers whose reviews are discussed below largely abstain from making direct political statements. Zaritsky is described as left-wing and Rusli as a nationalist, but their works are judged on the artists’ uses of color, brushstroke, and composition. This is remarkable because, in the 1950s, the political relationship between Indonesia and Israel was openly conflicted. Indonesia did recognize Palestine as a sovereign state, but not Israel, even though the Israeli government had congratulated Indonesia on its independence per telegram in 1949.[50] Instead, Indonesia expressed solidarity with the Arab countries in the Middle East that had supported it shortly after its declaration of independence in 1945. Indonesia did not invite Israel to the Asian Games in 1949 or to the Afro-Asian Conference in April 1955, which was reported on by international mass media.[51]
In Algemeen Handelsblad, Hans Redeker recognizes that Zaritsky’s paintings, “despite their highly abstract character,” have a “somewhat irregular relationship with the reality seen and lived through, which is suggested not only in the title… here and there a recognizable element as a flurry of visibility.”[52] In his realistic elements, Zaritsky reminds Redeker of Marc Chagall. The writer also speaks of Zaritsky as a leader of New Horizons and as “radical in his views and more or less the central figure of the most abstract left wing, which finds in Israel as another extreme of striving for national and Ecole de Paris liberated realism at its opposite.” But Redeker is generally critical of Zaritsky’s work: “And also his paintings often threaten to dissolve into a densely scribbled, as if possessed by horror vacui formlessness, leaving only the charm of color, in this painter’s work the prevailing element.” While Zaritsky has “French color” in him, Rusli is “entirely the exponent of another country: Indonesia,” a country he (incorrectly) considers, “as far as the oil painting technique is concerned,” to have “no support by any tradition.” In Rusli’s work, he sees a loose affiliation with “expressionism or Fauvism… but probably this style of direct note in fierce, strong colors appeals both to the vitality, revolutionary élan and urge for freedom that animates these youth of the new Indonesia.” Redeker is positive overall about Rusli, whose watercolors often achieve “a very pure expression,” and in whose “best works, an influence of Chinese and Japanese landscapes is unmistakable.”
A second comparative review written by M. was published in De Tijd.[53] The writer summarizes Zaritsky’s biography in three sentences before referring to Kolb’s text: “According to the catalogue, Zaritsky’s paintings express the view that art is an autonomous function of its creator and is purpose in itself. This opinion stands in contrast to the view that art is functional, and that its purpose is to give others a delight of beauty.” However, the writer doubted that Zaritsky should be counted among the “great artists,” because all “his compositions are so much alike that only the fundamental tone of colors remains in the mind… a single canvas that stays with you is not there.” Rusli is, in M.’s eyes, a “fierce nationalist and therefore it is surprising that he chose the Netherlands to hold an exhibition.” Over all, M. admires Rusli, “who often tackled the extremely difficult problem of capturing the Indies landscapes [Indische landschappen] with mastery,” but that these landscapes are Indonesian escapes the writer. M. compares Rusli to Van Gogh and Johan Jongkind, but also notes that “mannerism is no stranger to him.” Used critically, the term mannerism indicates “an [artist’s] obsession with style and technique in figural composition often outweigh[ing] the importance and meaning of the subject matter.”[54] In plain terms, the critic says Rusli occasionally puts on airs.
Kasper Niehaus reviewed Zaritsky/Rusli for De Telegraaf, and began by briefly contextualizing Zaritsky as an Israeli artist affiliated with Jewish-European painters such as Chaïm Soutine and Chagall.[55] He notes Zaritsky’s immigration to Eretz Yisrael in 1923 and says the artist is indebted to “our Mondriaan.” Niehaus is somewhat critical of Zaritsky’s abstract paintings. “Among other things, there are Israeli landscapes here and also Amsterdam cityscapes, which may be called nothing more than allusions to, assumptions of, our capital… in Zaritsky’s work, mannerism triumphs,” and “his paintings of Amsterdam have nothing special; they are not such that we think we see it with our own eyes.” In short, the critic disliked Zaritsky’s overwriting of Amsterdam with his international modernist style. In contrast to Zaritsky, the language of Rusli’s art is “pictorially not Indonesian… but generally European or particularly French: one sometimes thinks of Dufy (Raoul) for his work.” Another characteristic of Rusli that Niehaus seems to appreciate is that he “suffers less than Zaritsky from the general disease of our time: subjectivism.” Instead of gliding into mannerism, Rusli “manages to control and express not only his inner being, his ‘poetic soul’ as it is called, but also something of the outer world.”
As Huygens did in his review of Rusli’s first exhibition in the Netherlands, the writers in Algemeen Handelsblad, De Telegraaf, and De Tijd all noted “typical Eastern hallmarks” that reminded them of Japanese and Chinese traditional watercolor landscapes. Although they described Rusli as an Indonesian nationalist, they did not recognize how Rusli, as an Asian cosmopolitan artist, aesthetically claimed his right over the very definition of the archipelago’s landscape by inscribing it with site-specific cultural and geographical hallmarks. Strikingly, while Niehaus expresses his discomfort with Zaritsky’s Amsterdam paintings, he has no problem with the artist’s international abstract modernism overwriting of the Eastern, specifically the Palestinian, landscape.
The Zaritsky/Rusli historical case study benefits from the multidirectional memory model, as it enables multiple possibilities for intercultural comparison and engagement with international modernist art, its curation, and historical relationships with the Holocaust and the decolonization movement in Indonesia, a topic that has hitherto remained underexplored by historians of modern art. The study draws the conclusion that Sandberg’s international modernist curatorial practice created a space for memory related to the Holocaust and colonialism in Indonesia to emerge by tracing how these events were related historically to the presence of international modern art in Amsterdam’s public sphere in 1955. It reveals how modern art’s symbolic meaning implicitly motivated Sandberg’s international programming in the 1950s.
In the formalist fashion of the time, the symbolic meaning was connected to the artist’s nationality. Still, the politics of these nations remained tacit in the museum publications, and the Dutch art critics used geographical categories like international, West, and East without questioning their political meaning. If they had done so, they might have seen what this study discloses, namely that the curatorial pairing staged a visual struggle unfolding over Eastern land- and cityscapes, which is deeply connected to the memory of Word War II, the Holocaust, (de)colonization, and the geopolitical processes of the mid-twentieth century. The art critics recognized that Rusli has a strong geographical and cultural affiliation with the East, but not that Zaritsky rejected such an affiliation. Admittedly, this is easier to perceive with roughly seventy years of distance in time and the work of scholars like Zalmona and Said at hand. With the clarity of their scholarship in mind, this study recalls the Stedelijk’s historic engagement with equality, its modernist insistence on artistic autonomy, and its role as a protector of these values in the public sphere of Amsterdam.
Approaching Zaritsky/Rusli through the multidirectional memory model discloses how the Holocaust in Europe, decolonization in Asia, and the establishment of the Israeli state in the Palestinian region had major consequences for modern art, artists, and curators, including Sandberg, Zaritsky, and Rusli. The multidirectional memory model inspiring this study is therefore beneficial to a contemporary art historiography that wishes to consider the transitoriness of political power. Rothberg initially developed his theoretical model to think through how the past haunts the present in the public sphere of Washington, D.C. Inspired by his theoretical model, this study demonstrates that an art history dedicated to the memory of newcomer nations to the international art arena in the 1950s can contribute to the development of international solidarities and new visions for debates on historical justice in Amsterdam and beyond.
Kerstin Winking is a curator, writer, and historical researcher whose work centers on modern and contemporary art from the twentieth century to the present. She is also a PhD candidate at the Institute for History at Leiden University and a guest researcher at the Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies (KITLV). Kerstin is particularly interested in researching international socio-cultural contexts in which modern and contemporary art is created, exhibited, and discussed. For her dissertation research, she concentrates on the work and networks of modern artists in and from (colonial) Indonesia in the Bandung Era.
[1] My archival research in the Netherlands, Indonesia, India, and the United States for this article (and my forthcoming dissertation) has benefited from generous support at various points; I am grateful to the Jadefonds, the Royal Netherlands Institute of Southeast Asian and Caribbean Studies (KITLV), the Institut Teknologi Bandung, the Center for Curatorial Studies (CCS Bard), and the Mondriaan Fund.
[2] In the 1955 exhibition brochure published by the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam (and in several other publications about Rusli), the year of birth is noted as 1916. However, the tombstone of Rusli at the cemetery in Yogyakarta states 1912 as his year of birth. Word of mouth holds that no birth certificate was available when the Dutch issuing authorities put 1916 on Rusli’s travel document. Later, he insisted on 1912 as his year of birth, and so this year was put on his tombstone.
[3] Caroline Roodenburg-Schadd has shown how this framework was creatively based on the “generational” theory that the development of art is related to the Zeitgeist (spirit of the time) specific to each generation. This art historical approach to modern art underpinned the way in which Sandberg conceptualized (the program of) exhibitions under the banner of 5 generaties after World War II. The approach is a form of writing art history as a history of ideas (Geistesgeschichte). Inspired by this art historiography, Sandberg developed his curatorial vision in conversation with Co Werlemann after World War II. Caroline Roodenburg-Schadd, Expressie en ordening: Het verzamelbeleid van Willem Sandberg voor het Stedelijk Museum 1945–1962 (Amsterdam and Rotterdam: Stedelijk Museum, NAi Uitgevers, 2004), 142–161.
[4] Sticusa was a foundation for cultural cooperation between the Netherlands, Indonesia, and the Dutch colonies in the “West” (Suriname and the Antilles). The foundation was active in Indonesia between 1948 and 1956. In her article, Liesbeth Dolk demonstrated that Sticusa, having been conceptualized by the Dutch, was bound to fail because of Indonesian trust issues and the paternalistic attitude. Liesbeth L. Dolk, “An entangled affair: Sticusa and Indonesia, 1948–1956,” in Heirs to World Culture, eds. Jennifer Lindsay et al. (Leiden: Brill, 2012): 57–74.
[5] Michael Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization (2009), 3–5.
[6] The exhibition Het Stedelijk in de Oorlog (2015) demonstrated how Sandberg protected the Stedelijk’s international modern art collection from Nazi threat and supported Jewish and politically persecuted modernists who had found refuge in Amsterdam. Gregor Langfeld and Margriet Schavemaker, eds., Het Stedelijk in de Oorlog (Amsterdam: Uitgeverij Bas Lubberhuizen and Stedelijk Museum, 2015).
[7] Ank Leeuw-Marcar, ed., Willem Sandberg (Amsterdam: Meulenhoff, 1981), 107–109.
[8] Iris Van Ooijen and Ilse Raaijmakers, “Competitive or Multidirectional Memory? The Interaction between Postwar and Postcolonial Memory in the Netherlands,” Journal of Genocide Research 14 (2012): 463–483, accessed August 9, 2023.
[9] Roodenburg-Schadd, Expressie en Ordening, 142.
[10] According to documents in the Archive of the Stedelijk Museum in the Stadsarchief Amsterdam, their works were spread over the three museum rooms 28, 29, and 34.
[11] In her book about Sandberg’s collection policy, Roodenburg-Schadd lists several exhibition projects that confirm his internationalism. Roodenburg-Schadd, Expressie en Ordening, 413–414.
[12] Langfeld and Schavemaker, Het Stedelijk in de Oorlog.
[13] Dina Kashapova, Kunst, Diskurs und Nationalsozialismus: Semantische und pragmatische Studien (Berlin: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 2012), 134, accessed August 12, 2023. Translation by the author.
[14] Ibid., 5.
[15] Jan Romein, Nieuw Nederland: Algemene beginselen ener hervorming in hoofd en leden (Amsterdam: Vrij Nederland, 1945), 10–11.
[16] Agoes Djaya, Otto Djaya, exh. cat. (Amsterdam: Gemeente Musea, 1947); and The Djaya Brothers: Revolusi in the Stedelijk, 2018, accessed August 9, 2023.
[17] Solichin Salam, Agus Djaya dan sejarah seni lukis Indonesia (Jakarta: Pusat Studi dan Penelitian Islam, 1994), 22.
[18] Willem F. Wertheim, Het Rassenprobleem: De Ondergang van een Mythe (Amsterdam: Albani, 1949). Translation by the author.
[19] Monica Sassatelli, with reference to Lawrence Alloway. Monica Sassatelli, “Symbolic Production in the Art Biennial: Making Worlds,” Theory, Culture & Society 34 (2017): 97, accessed August 9, 2023.
[20] Edward Said, “Invention, Memory, and Place,” Critical Inquiry 26 (2000): 175–192, accessed August 9, 2023.
[21] Yigal Zalmona, A Century of Israeli Art, exh. cat. (Jerusalem, Farnham: The Israel Museum, Lund Humphries, 2013).
[22] Zalmona, A Century of Israeli Art, 165. For a historiography of the differences between the artists’ groups New Bezalel in Jerusalem and New Horizon in Tel Aviv, see Noa Avron Barak, “The National, the Diasporic, and the Canonical: The Place of Diasporic Imagery in the Canon of Israeli National Art,” Arts 9 (2020): 1–17, accessed August 9, 2023.
[23] Sassatelli, “Symbolic Production in the Art Biennial,” 14.
[24] Roodenburg-Schadd, Expressie en Ordening, 414.
[25] The exhibition took place September 4–23, 1954, at Kunstzaal Plaats in The Hague. Archive of Kunstzaal Plaats in the collection of RKD – Nederlands Instituut voor Kunstgeschiedenis, inventarisnummer 05105.034.
[26] Fijn van Draat, July 8, 1955, letter on behalf of Sticusa to Willem Sandberg. Archive of the Stedelijk Museum in the Stadsarchief Amsterdam.
[27] Willem Sandberg, July 12, 1955, letter to Rusli in Rome. Archive of the Stedelijk Museum in the Stadsarchief Amsterdam.
[28] According to the exhibition lists in the Stadsarchief Amsterdam, three watercolors and several drawings by Rusli were owned by Sticusa, but research into the foundation’s (partly lost) archives so far provided no clues about their whereabouts.
[29] F. P. Huygens, “Tentoonstelling van Indonesisch Schilder,” Algemeen Handelsblad, September 15, 1954.
[30] The Indonesian educator and politician Soerjaningrat (later known as Ki Hadjar Dewantara) was an activist for Indonesian independence from the early days of the nationalist movement. He was exiled in the Netherlands between 1913 and 1919 for his political activities. There he earned a teaching certificate that would entitle him to teach in colonial Indonesia and establish a school, which he did with the Taman Siswa in Yogyakarta in 1922. Soon after, many more schools modeled on Soerjaningrat’s Taman Siswa concept were established throughout colonial Indonesia.
[31] On modern art, Pan-Asianism, and cosmopolitanism in Santiniketan, see R. Siva Kumar, Santiniketan: The Making of a Contextual Modernism, exh. cat. (New Delhi: National Gallery of Modern Art, 1997). On “primitivist environmentalism” among modernists in Santiniketan, see Partha Mitter, The Triumph of Modernism: India’s Artists and the Avant-garde, 1922–1947 (London: Reaktion, 2007).
[32] Nandalal Bose and K. G. Subramanyan, Vision & Creation (Santiniketan: Visva-Bharati Publishing Department, 1999), 27–28. Originally published in Bengali in 1944.
[33] Taufik Abdullah, War, Revolution, and the Nation State (Singapore: Institute of Southeast Asian Studies, 2009), 108.
[34] According to the brochure, Rusli worked as a teacher at the Taman Siswa in Yogyakarta from 1938 to 1945. In 1945, he founded Seni Rupa Masjarakat (Fine Arts Community) in Yogyakarta with Affandi, Harjadi, Gunadi, Hendra, and Suripto. Rusli became chairman of the Seniman Indonesia Muda (SIM) in Yogyakarta in 1946. “During the revolution,” the brochure states, “he also fulfilled his obligations. In the 2nd Dutch Police Action, he assisted the guerrilla in the military district. He was an emergency junior high school teacher in Wonosari and with the student mobilization in Pundong.”
[35] Bose and Subramanyan, Vision & Creation, 136.
[36] Ibid., 42.
[37] Eugen Kolb, Joseph Zaritsky, exh. cat. (Amsterdam: Gemeente Musea, 1955), n.p.
[38] Igor Aronov, “The Sources of Yosef Zaritsky’s Art,” Jewish Art 21/22 (1995): 131.
[39] Ibid., 133.
[40] Kolb, Joseph Zaritsky.
[41] Tribute to Zaritsky, exh. cat. (Jerusalem: The Israel Museum, 1981), n.p.
[42] Ibid.
[43] Zalmona, A Century of Israeli Art, 165.
[44] Ibid., 166.
[45] Kolb, Joseph Zaritsky.
[46] Zalmona, A Century of Israeli Art, 168–169.
[47] For New Horizon’s other Western referential orientations, see Noa Avron Barak, “The National, the Diasporic, and the Canonical: The Place of Diasporic Imagery in the Canon of Israeli National Art,” Arts 9, no. 2 (2020): 14, accessed August 18, 2023.
[48] Zalmona, A Century of Israeli Art, 169.
[49] Said, “Invention, Memory, and Place,” 187.
[50] Greg Barton and Colin Rubenstein, “Indonesia and Israel: A Relationship in Waiting,” Jewish Political Studies Review 17 (2005): 157–170.
[51] Abdullah, War, Revolution, and the Nation State, 301. Naoko Shimazu, “Diplomacy as Theatre: Staging the Bandung Conference of 1955,” Modern Asian Studies 48, no. 1 (2013): 225–252, accessed June 24, 2024.
[52] Hans Redeker, “Joseph Zaritsky en Rusli: Gasten uit Israël en Indonesië,” Algemeen Handelsblad, September 20, 1955. All quotes in this paragraph are from this article. Translation by the author.
[53] M. “Ontmoeting met St.-Lucas, een Israëliet en een Indonesiër,” De Tijd, October 8, 1955. All quotes in this paragraph are from this article. Translation by the author.
[54] “Mannerism,” Encyclopædia Britannica (2020), accessed August 18, 2023.
[55] Kasper Niehaus, “Israelisch en Indonesisch Schilder in Sted. Museum,” De Telegraaf, October 11, 1955. All quotes in this paragraph are from this article. Translation by the author.
Winking, Kerstin. “Zaritsky/Rusli: A Multidirectional Approach to Curating International Modern Art.” Stedelijk Studies Journal 14 (2024). https://doi.org/10.54533/. This contribution is licensed under a CC BY 4.0 license.
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