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Emiria Soenassa (1862-1978)
Seated Woman, 1947
Oil on Canvas
55.9 x 38.1 cm
Provenance:
Prominent US Collector, New Jersey
Known as the mother of Indonesia modern art and first female painter of Indonesia, Myths abound in accounts of Emiria Soenassa. According to the oral and written histories unearthed by scholar Heidi Arbuckle, Emiria is recorded as a nurse (1912–1914), a student of eurhythmics in Brussels and Austria (1914–1915), a singer and pianist in Ternate (1920s), and someone who travelled widely across the Indonesian archipelago through the 1920s and 1930s working in plantations, mines and factories. During these travels, she mingled with diverse ethnic groups in Papua, Kalimantan and South Sumatra, and was remembered by those who claimed to know her as an elephant hunter, poison maker and the “tiger woman." While records are inconsistent, she was undoubtedly a pioneer of Indonesian modern art.
Emiria made her debut as a painter at the first art exhibition of native artists held at the Kolff bookstore in Batavia in 1940, and took part in the watershed exhibition of PERSAGI (Association of Indonesian Drawing Masters) at the Batavia Art Circle in 1941. During the Japanese Occupation, a magazine article on Indonesian artists preparing for an exhibition at the Keimin Bunka Shidosho (Centre for People’s Enlightenment and Cultural Guidance) featured a photograph of Emiria standing in front of an easel with a confident gaze, along with images of five other artists from the period, S. Sudjojono, Agus and Otto Djaya, Basoeki Abdullah and Kartono Yudhokusumo. The accompanying text reads: “her forceful touch and electric colours places her in a distinct position within the Indonesian art circle that has little sign of individualism,” signifying her unique positioning at that time. In all the exhibitions Emiria showed between 1940 and 1950, she was the sole female artist.
Emiria Soenassa claim to be Queen of West Irian, The Straits Time 6 July 1960
Emiria claimed to be a princess of the Tidore sultanate. Between the 1940s and 1960s, she was politically active in the struggle for Papuan independence from the Dutch colonial administration. In contrast to works by her contemporaries which tended towards social and mainstream nationalist interests, her works presented the concerns of people at the margins of the nation—ethnic groups on the eastern part of Indonesia and women. In all of her paintings from the 1940s and 1950s, she focused on those largely unrepresented in the grand national narrative of Indonesia, consistently using subversive approaches to unsettle the assumptions associated with the internal Other.
In this earliest surviving work, this portrait shows the sitter portrayed in a classic, frontal view. She is wearing a loose long blouse and sarong closely resembling the traditional garment, baju bodo, typically worn by women in Sulawesi. The sitter is set against tropical greenery. The deep, dark green tones evoke a sense of a dense jungle, whereby its intensity is matched by the brooding, emotional undertones of the sitter. The painting's focus centres on the woman's face, deep in thought and eyes averted from the painter and viewer.
The hands on her lap appear large and heavy, unlike delicate forms typically portrayed of female subjects. On closer inspection, the artist employed an impasto effect on the knuckles, to accentuate the tautness of skin, muscular tension and psychological tenor of the sitter. Her posture is bent forward, it is not impassive but suggests a readiness to action.
The steely resoluteness of the sitter's stance is intensified by the blood red colour of her head shawl, recalling the crimson banner of the Indonesian flag.
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