ART AND THE ARTIST

THE PLACE OF THE ARTIST IN BALINESE LIFE

Their art is a highly developed, although informal Baroque folk-art that combines the peasant liveliness with the refinement of the classicism of Hinduistic Java, but free of conservative prejudice and with a new vitality fired by the exuberance of the demoniac spirit of the tropical primitive. The Balinese peasants took the flowery art of ancient Java, itself an offshoot of the aristocratic art of India of the seventh and eighth centuries, brought it down to earth, and made it popular property.

Balinese art is not in the class of the “ great “ arts like great Chinese painting - the conscious production of works of art for their own sake, with an aesthetic value apart from their function. Again, it is too refined, too developed, to fit into peasant arts; nor is it one of the primitive arts, those subject to ritual and tribal laws, which we call “ primitive “ because their aesthetics do not conform to ours.

Although at the service of religion, Balinese art is not a religious art. An artist carves ludicrous subjects in the temples or embellishes objects of daily use with religious symbols, using them purely as ornamental elements regardless of their significance. The Balinese carve or paint to tell the only stories they know - those created by their intellectuals, the religious teachers of former times.

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