Sudjana Kerton

Sudjana Kerton (born Bandung, West Java, 22 November 1922; died Bandung, 6 April 1994) was an Indonesian painter whose half-century career runs from the drawings he made as an artist-reporter of the Indonesian Revolution, through Amsterdam, Paris, New York and Mexico, to the crowded, humorous canvases of everyday West-Javanese life he painted after coming home to Bandung in 1976.

Largely self-taught, he began in Bandung painting portraits and still lifes. His first guide was his cousin Kendar Kerton, seven years his senior; when Kendar was dying of tuberculosis in 1939 he asked Sudjana to carry on his work, and from then on Sudjana signed his paintings "S. Kerton" in his memory (Astri Wright, The Jakarta Post, 1994). He also learned from European painters working in Bandung — the estate names Jos Pluimentz, Ries Mulder and Henk de Vos — and during the Japanese occupation exhibited with the young Indonesian painters who gathered at the Keimin Bunka Shidōsho cultural centre in Bandung and Jakarta.

Through the Revolution he was an artist-reporter for Patriot, the paper edited by Usmar Ismail, drawing events as they happened — among them Soekarno speaking at Cirebon on 23 May 1947 and the handover of military authority in Bandung in 1949 (Carla Bianpoen, The Jakarta Post, 2001). In January 1947 an exhibition in Yogyakarta of forty-one revolution paintings by Kerton, Barli and Kustiwa earned the three the name "revolutiemeesters", masters of the revolution (Arnhemsche Courant, 21 January 1947). President Soekarno acquired work from these years; most of the rest was destroyed when Dutch forces took Yogyakarta in December 1948, while Kerton was away sketching on Timor.

In January 1950, invited by the Dutch cultural foundation Sticusa, he left for the Netherlands with some thirty paintings and 250 watercolours (Java-bode, 3 January 1950) — among the first Indonesian artists to go to Europe on a cultural exchange. He worked in Amsterdam and Paris, where the estate records that he studied at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière, and in 1951 the Stedelijk Museum bought his watercolour Weg naar Versailles (Nieuwe Courant, 20 April 1951). By the autumn of 1951 he was in New York on a scholarship to the Art Students League, studying painting with Yasuo Kuniyoshi and printmaking with Harry Sternberg and Will Barnet. In 1953 he married Louise, an American nurse; they had three children, the eldest their daughter Tjandra.

New York was his base for a quarter of a century. He held a solo exhibition at the Monede Gallery on Madison Avenue in 1960, and in the summer of 1962, after Affandi visited him and the two painted together — Affandi Eating Watermelon, now among the stolen works, dates from that day — he followed Affandi to Mexico, where he spent about a year studying mural painting (Amir Sidharta, The Jakarta Post, 1997); the Mexican palette transformed his colour. In 1964 UNICEF chose his woodcut Homeward (1956) for the Christmas cards it sold worldwide — by the estate's account the first Indonesian artist so honoured — and that year he made his first visit home. In 1966 he was commissioned to paint a mural, Tanah Airku – My Country, for the Indonesian Embassy in The Hague, and from 1968 to 1973 he ran his own Sudjana Galleries in Mt. Kisco and North Salem, New York, teaching drawing, painting and batik.

In 1976 Kerton came home. On a bare hilltop at Bukit Pakar, Dago Atas, above Bandung — within sight of Tangkuban Prahu, Mount Manglayang and the Malabar hills — he built the studio and home he called Sanggar Luhur, and entered what the estate calls "arguably, the most outstanding and prolific period of his career": street vendors and becak ranks, jamu sellers and market crowds, wayang golek and Sundanese weddings, observed with humour and a caricaturist's eye. "I am part of every subject I paint … This is why I paint from memory, to be able to express my inner feelings more clearly," he wrote (kertonart.com). He held solo exhibitions in Jakarta — at Taman Ismail Marzuki (1980, 1985), Balai Budaya (1984) and Erasmus Huis (1988) — published Tanah Airku – My Country, Indonesia (1990) with Louise, and in 1993 was shown at the first Asia-Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art in Brisbane.

He died in Bandung on 6 April 1994. His work is held by the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, the Singapore Art Museum, the National Gallery of Indonesia and Museum MACAN, among others. Since his death the family, from Sanggar Luhur, has kept his record and his work before the public: the retrospective Nasionalisme dan Perubahannya (Jakarta, 1996); The Revolution & Evolution of Sudjana Kerton (Museum Benteng Vredeburg, Yogyakarta, 1999), curated by M. Dwi Marianto of ISI Yogyakarta (The Jakarta Post, 1999); The Lone Wolf (Honolulu Academy of Arts, 2006–07); and The Hidden Treasures of Sudjana Kerton (Art:1 New Museum, Jakarta, 2025). On 2 February 1997 nineteen of his paintings were stolen from the family's gallery in Bandung; this catalogue keeps a public register of them.

This biography rests on the estate's biodata and kertonart.com, corroborated and dated from contemporary sources — Dutch newspapers of 1947–51, The Jakarta Post (Astri Wright, Amir Sidharta, Carla Bianpoen) and Kompas. Where the sources differ, see the notes on the sources.