Australian Museum Balinese Collection

In the 1970’s the Museum acquired 150 Kamasan paintings from anthropologist Professor Anthony Forge, who had collected them during his research in Bali. According to a long-standing tradition, the designated artists of Kamasan (a village in the Klungkung Regency in south-east Bali) made the traditional-style paintings on cloth (and earlier on barkcloth) for the royal court and temples. These figurative paintings retell the sacred stories where gods, humans, devils and animals are depicted in a form derived from shadow puppets. This is often called wayang (shadow) or Kamasan style.

Sixty of these paintings were exhibited in the AM exhibition Balinese Traditional Paintings in 1978, accompanied by Forge’s catalogue. The exhibition explained and popularised traditional Balinese paintings to new audiences, and the catalogue proved to be one of the essential references on the subject for students, scholars, and Balinese artists. The Museum also acquired a part of the extensive research documentation and photography assembled during Forge’s fieldwork.

To enhance the Kamasan collection, the Museum conducted a collaborative research project with the University of Sydney (2009-2012), seeking to understand Balinese paintings and related objects, narratives, aesthetics and their social contexts. This four-year project produced research publications, and a digital repository of paintings collated from major public and private collections around the world. As part of the project, the Museum team also assembled a new collection of Kamasan paintings, this time by women artists.

The project also stimulated personal contacts with Balinese artists and communities and addressed an important ethical issue: the right to this knowledge. As a result, some of Forge’s photos from the 1970's were printed and given to the families and descendants, some of were also artists, continuing their family traditions. Copies of Forge’s catalogue were gifted to painters who valued it as an important iconographic reference to older paintings.

In the 1980-1990's over two hundred musical instruments, costumes, and accessories, some specifically for community use, were acquired with the assistance of Balinese expert Tjokorde Raka Kerthyasa and musician Gary Watson. As a result, since 1984 the Museum has been running one of its longest and most sustained local outreach programs where the instruments and accessories are used for teaching, practice, and in ceremonies by Balinese and Javanese communities, musicians, and students in Sydney.

In 2011 Leo Haks donated one hundred modernist Balinese paintings to the collection, extending the scope of the Balinese art collection with examples from a period of major aesthetic and cultural change (1928-1942). The donation included some paintings originally collected in the 1930's by Theo Meier, as well as paintings collected by anthropologists Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson, mostly around Batuan and Sanur (central-south Bali). Leo Haks not only collected, but also documented and identified these modernist Balinese paintings as a cultural phenomenon. He collated an extensive inventory, including images, of these paintings, many dispersed and kept in various public and private collections.

Haks defined this art movement and popularised it via the travelling exhibition Pre-War Balinese Modernists 1928-1942, in the 1990's on show in Netherlands, Germany and Indonesia. Its version Crossing Boundaries. Bali: A Window to 20th Century Indonesian Art was shown in Australia in 2002-2003.

Over 350 masks, carvings, textiles, and accessories donated by collector Michael Abbott in 2021-2024 not only enlarged the museum’s Balinese collection, but also extended its scope and context. Over his lifetime of interest in Balinese cultural expression, Michael Abbott collected many older pieces, some that originated in the 19th century (and a few that are even older). The donation included de-commissioned paintings and figures, ceremonial accessories, masks, and textiles, some that had been unused for decades.

The Museum holds a smaller collection of Balinese textiles and clothing, including 18 of the iconic double ikat Geringsing textiles from Tenganan Pegerinsingan village in Karangasem Regency in east Bali. Twelve of these Geringsing fabrics are part of a 2023 donation of over eighty Balinese textiles by John Yu, who is a long-time student and connoisseur of Asian art. The collection includes also thirty iconic Balinese Lamaks, mostly from the Michael Abbott and John Yu donations.

Geringsing ceremonial fabrics are made using the double ikat method, a difficult process in which both the warp and weft threads are dyed and woven to carefully match and form the preconceived design. Geringsing are made from hand-spun cotton with natural dye colours restricted to greyish yellow, deep reds, bluish-black or deep purple.

Lamak are long narrow cloths placed on altars and shrines. The hanging is laid horizontally on the shrine’s shelf, with the offerings placed upon it and the lower, decorated, part of the cloth hanging down the front of the shrine.

• Siobhan Campbel. Craft and the archive: Museum collections and memory in a Balinese village. Craft + design enquiry issue 6, 2014, Craft. Material. Memory, Edited by Anne Brennan and Patsy Hely, ANU Press, The Australian National University 2014, p. 183-204.
• Stan Florek. The Balinese collection at the Australian Museum, Sydney. Chapter 22 in Interwoven Journeys: The Michael Abbott Collections Asian Art. Editors James Bennett and Russell Kelty, Art Gallery of South Australia, 2023, p. 294-299.
• Anthony Forge. Balinese traditional paintings: a selection from the Forge Collection of the Australian Museum, Sydney, Australian Museum 1978.
• Leo Haks and Guus Maris. Pre-War Balinese Modernists 1928 - 1942. Amsterdam. Exhibition catalogue 1999.