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Lot Essay
The original and the only owner of the work had directly acquired the work from the artist during his 20 year stay in Indonesia. Having assembled a collection of mainly first generation Indonesian modernists which included Affandi, Hendra Gunawan and Lee Man Fong, the collection was sent to Milan, Italy when the collector returned to Italy in 1985.
"Throughout his long painting career, self portraits remained an important theme in his work. These offer an unrivalled chronicle of images of self in Indonesian art, produced over a period of fifty years. They show the life progress of a highly original man, who wanted to see nothing but what was there, before his eyes, in its most essential form. Affandi's style has been called expressionistic but to him his works were more true to the subject than any degree of photo-realism could have been - an honesty which had more to do with emotional experience than with intellectual analysis. As he said in the 1982 film by Yasir Marzuki, Hungry to Paint Affandi did not see himself as a clever man, 'not like Picasso'. He was more like Van Gogh - a man of strong emotion, which in turn gave rise to works of art; the stylistic similarity between himself and Van Gogh that people always point to was a matter of emotional affinity. In all of Affandi's work, including his self-portraits, his aim was to capture the very essence of the life-force which suffuses the universe." (Astri Wright, Soul, Spirit, and Mountain: Preoccupations of Contemporary Indonesian Painters, Oxford University Press, Kuala Lumpur, 1994, p.112).
In his many self-portraits Affandi only concentrated on representing his head and facial expression. This is mainly because he wanted to record his emotion at that particular moment. Naturally the artist also faithfully recorded the ageing process as the years went by but it is the 'spur of the moment' kind of emotion that fascinated the artist. He famously painted the subject of his 3 emotions on one composition which he represented with 3 different Affandi (s) on the same canvas. True to the spirit of an expressionist, Affandi allowed the reign of his own emotion in his work, a process that is as satisfying as it is to an artist as it is to a soul-searching individual who is ever continuing with the process of self-awareness.
"Throughout his long painting career, self portraits remained an important theme in his work. These offer an unrivalled chronicle of images of self in Indonesian art, produced over a period of fifty years. They show the life progress of a highly original man, who wanted to see nothing but what was there, before his eyes, in its most essential form. Affandi's style has been called expressionistic but to him his works were more true to the subject than any degree of photo-realism could have been - an honesty which had more to do with emotional experience than with intellectual analysis. As he said in the 1982 film by Yasir Marzuki, Hungry to Paint Affandi did not see himself as a clever man, 'not like Picasso'. He was more like Van Gogh - a man of strong emotion, which in turn gave rise to works of art; the stylistic similarity between himself and Van Gogh that people always point to was a matter of emotional affinity. In all of Affandi's work, including his self-portraits, his aim was to capture the very essence of the life-force which suffuses the universe." (Astri Wright, Soul, Spirit, and Mountain: Preoccupations of Contemporary Indonesian Painters, Oxford University Press, Kuala Lumpur, 1994, p.112).
In his many self-portraits Affandi only concentrated on representing his head and facial expression. This is mainly because he wanted to record his emotion at that particular moment. Naturally the artist also faithfully recorded the ageing process as the years went by but it is the 'spur of the moment' kind of emotion that fascinated the artist. He famously painted the subject of his 3 emotions on one composition which he represented with 3 different Affandi (s) on the same canvas. True to the spirit of an expressionist, Affandi allowed the reign of his own emotion in his work, a process that is as satisfying as it is to an artist as it is to a soul-searching individual who is ever continuing with the process of self-awareness.