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Adrianus Wilhelmus Smit - Auckland
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Adrianus Wilhelmus (Arie) Smit "Auckland" Oil on plate 38 x 58 cm
Adrianus Wilhelmus (Arie) Smit (Zaandam, April 15, 1916 – Denpasar, March 23, 2016) was a Dutch painter of Indonesian nationality. Since 1956 he lived in Bali, where he made many paintings. His work is very colorful and reveals influences of Fauvism and Expressionism.
Lifecycle:
Arie Smit, son of a cheese dealer, attended the Drawing School in Rotterdam and briefly studied graphic design at the Rotterdam Art Academy. As a young man he was inspired by three French artists: Paul Signac, Paul Gauguin and Paul Cézanne. In 1938 he registered with the KNIL in Nijmegen. After a three-month training course, he left for Java in the Dutch East Indies, where he made maps of the archipelago as a lithographic draftsman for the Topographical Service (part of the KNIL) in Batavia. At the outbreak of the Second World War in Asia in 1942, he was assigned to the infantry in Malang, but was captured shortly afterwards by the Japanese occupation forces. He worked for three and a half years as a prisoner of war in labor camps on the Burma-Siam railway (Death Railway) in Thailand and Burma, building roads, bridges and railways. He was released in August 1945 and in January 1946 he returned to the Topographical Service in Djakarta (formerly Batavia) in the new republic of Indonesia. In his spare time he traveled through Java to paint. He had his first exhibition in Jakarta in 1948. After his dismissal from the KNIL in 1950, he went to work at various publishing houses in Bandung and Jakarta. In 1951 Arie Smit obtained Indonesian citizenship. He taught graphic arts and lithography at the Akademi Seni Rupa Bandung (Institut Teknologi Bandung) in 1955.
At the invitation of the Dutch artist Rudolf Bonnet, he visited Bali in 1956 together with the Dutch artist Auke Sonnega, where he was attracted by the landscapes. He decided to stay there to capture the villages, rice terraces, palm trees, temples and Balinese people. He would move about forty times, each time to see what lay beyond the next hill, but he spent the longest time in Karangasem and Buleleng. In the early 1960s he inspired local young people in the village of Penestanan near Ubud, gave them advice and materials and this led to a new Balinese school: the somewhat naive 'Young Artists'. In 1965, he was asked to assist in setting up an art department at Udayana University in Denpasar. He was awarded the prestigious Dharma Kusama award in 1992 for his role in the development of art in Bali.
Over the years, Smit became a well-known artist in Indonesia, whose work appears in numerous collections. The Neka Art Museum in Ubud, a private museum, probably has the largest collection of Arie Smits, in its own pavilion: the Arie Smit Pavilion. Smit has lived in the village of Sanggingan near Ubud since 1992.
Arie Smit died on March 23, 2016 in Denpasar, Bali, at the age of 99.
ConditionVery goodColorsBlue, WhiteMaterialOtherNumber of items1Height38 cmWidth58 cm