Walter Spies – Essay for Stay in Art Bookazine
(Original in German, machine translated):
THE GERMAN EXOTIC
This man is one of the many Germans whose unusual path has led to them being almost forgotten in Germany today, but recognised in other countries. Born in 1895 – in the birth shadow of Adolf Hitler and Joseph Goebbels, so to speak – he belonged to the generation that would eventually have to decide to flee or march with the Nazis.
But Spies is a special case compared to the Thomas Manns and Billy Wilders. Quickly becoming a respected artist of magical realism in the boisterous Berlin of the early twenties, exhibited with Klee and Grosz, Spies soon caught the affection of Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau, one of the most important silent film directors. Spies is said to have already worked behind the scenes on Murnau’s Nosferatu, the first Dracula adaptation for the cinema, and moved like a fish in water in that colourful and avant-garde scene that would flee to Hollywood, Israel, Moscow or at least Zurich ten years later at the latest.
But even before his arrival in revolutionary Germany after the First World War, Spies had adventures to endure. Coming from a grand bourgeois family (the Spies family, for example, introduced cigarette production to Germany from St. Petersburg), he lived between the Spiesschen Stadtpalais in Moscow, an estate in the south of the Reich and an elite grammar school in Dresden, Germany. As a teenager, he regularly met Gorky, Rachmaninoff and the superstar of the day, Alexander Skriabin, in his aunt’s Moscow salon. At the outbreak of the First World War, Spies suddenly found himself back in his Russian homeland as an enemy and was exiled to the Urals months later, only to return to Moscow on his own initiative in the chaos following the October Revolution. As so often in the future, Spies was to handle the dramatic twists and turns of his life with virtuosity. So he settled in as best he could in a primitive steppe community among Tatars, Bashkirs and Kirghiz, learning their language and above all their music. After a few months he was performing concerts of Beethoven and Tatar folk songs and was considered the uncroaked entertainment king of the otherwise presumably desolate place of exile Sterlitamak. The sometimes curious, sometimes dangerous experiences with the nomads in the boundless steppes of the southern Urals would accompany Spies everywhere he went.
Spies is considered one of the first artists from the West to settle in Bali. Before that, he spent four years as the first white man to perform the role of chapel master in the palace of the Javanese Muslim sultan of Yogyakarta.
How modern the world of the 1930s already was can be seen from the fact that Spies’ paradise in Bali soon inspired the fantasies of the Happy Few in both the Old and New Worlds. And so they all came: Charlie Chaplin, Vicki Baum, Barbara Hutton, the richest woman in the world at the time, ethnologists and composers, filmmakers and researchers, and soon aristocrats and nouveau riche who were interested in his paintings. Elli Beinhorn travelled with her plane on a course around the world. Involuntarily and unawares, Spies had brought luxury tourism to Bali.
The island, part of the Dutch Indies, was suffering from the world economic crisis, as was the entire colony at the time. So tourism was welcome, and Bali, with its flair of bare-breasted beauty and tropical cheerfulness as well as its untouched culture, was to become the global laboratory for the international industry after Hawaii. Spies helped a nephew of Theodore Roosevelt to make a film called Goona Goona (Love Magic), which was to ignite a Bali fever in the USA.
Of course, like many others, Spies had fled Europe in 1923 because of his homosexuality. When, by the end of the 1930s, authoritarian regimes had formed from Russia to Spain and the pre-war atmosphere also reached the equator, the Bali paradise of the gays came into the sights of the Dutch authorities. In December 1938, Spies was arrested on suspicion of paedophilia and, despite prominent defence by both the Balinese and anthropology experts such as Margaret Mead, who twenty years later would become an idol of feminism in the Beat Generation, was sentenced to prison, albeit a short one. At the same time, some of his most important works were created during this time.
These paintings reveal how Spies had searched for a way out of the dead ends of the Western avant-garde and probably found it in the tropics. His style had radically changed under the existential impression of Bali. Balinese have in turn knelt before his paintings. Ironically, most of the works that have not disappeared into private collections are in Indonesian museums. Once – rarely enough – one of his works comes on the auction market, the hammer now falls at seven-figure figures.
With the invasion of Nazi Germany in the Netherlands, Spies became a prisoner of war for the second time, although he had never visited the Germany with which his tropical homeland was at war. After Pearl Harbour and the Japanese advance into Southeast Asia at the end of 1941, the internment was tightened.
At the beginning of 1942, the freighter Van Imhoff, flying the Dutch flag, left the small island of Nias off Sumatra with nearly 600 prisoners of war on board, including Walter Spies, bound for British Ceylon. The freighter had lifeboats for only about half the passengers. Shortly after the Van Imhoff set sail, it was sunk by a Japanese fighter jet. The Dutch crew, including the guards, fled to safety on boats and were later picked up by the Japanese. Walter Spies perished with most of his fellow sufferers in the ocean.
The last postcards he wrote to his Dutch friends outside the internment camp testify to the fact that the cheerful confidence that had already helped him through all the suffering in the Urals did not leave him in Sumatra. “It is easy to die among these people,” he wrote earlier to his younger brother Leo, referring to the Indonesians.
From the perspective of postcolonialist critics, Spies is by no means considered an innocent. In retrospect, of course, those who want to are always wiser. However, Spies was not one of those white imperialists who took advantage of the wealth of a foreign culture.
If he had stayed in Germany or fled to Switzerland like his friend Paul Klee, he would probably have become – in the sense of his critic mentor Franz Roh – a recognised representative of Magical Realism. His works would hang in the public collections of German and other Western museums, academics would study him, there would be literature on his work as an artist, musicologist, ethnologist, etc.
But Spies was not interested in a place in cultural history. He lived and loved the moment. He did not paint to become famous, to create a new art movement or anything similar, but out of admiration for the magic of the world in which he lived. This indifference to the fame of posterity united him with the Balinese artists. In the Bali of yore, the artist worked in the “community”, often anonymously, not as a representative of the “creative class”. Not the future, nor the past, but only the present was a prerequisite for Spies to work. He was literally a contemporary artist.
At the same time, he already saw the decline of Western culture and the end of its supremacy over other cultures approaching. Spies welcomed the latter and, in his exchanges with the Balinese, developed an almost naïve optimism, especially in the early years.
For eighty years, generations of dissidents and drop-outs have been moving to the tropics with his example in mind, in search of an alternative life. Some of these mostly young people have stayed there forever, others have later returned home somewhere between Sydney, Bern and California and become well-paid lawyers or tourism entrepreneurs or artists. Walter Spies stands for the unconditional freedom to go one’s own way. In search of an unlosable, unlosable utopia. In this he should not be too different from the young people of today who, like him, are sceptical about the illusory answers that their – our – society offers them.
But the enthusiasm for Bali soon led to a worrying tourism boom. And paradise was not spared from demons. In 2002, several bombs exploded in Islamist attacks, among others in a popular nightclub in Kuta. 202 people died, 209 were injured, some of them seriously. On an audio cassette, Osama Bin Laden declared the attack as a response to the US-American War on Terror.
But global tourism has no long-term memory. In 2017, TripAdvisor crowned Bali with the “Traveler’s Choice Award” as the world’s most attractive holiday destination. Meanwhile, about twice as many tourists visit the island as it has inhabitants. Some even want to visit Bali after their death: David Bowie’s last will, for example, stipulated that his ashes be scattered on the ground of the sacred Gunung Agung, of all places, the place that served Spies as a refuge from the importunities of Western visitors in the late 1930s.
Although Walter Spies was certainly not a brooding man, he recognised the danger of tourist exploitation early on and tried to stop it. The longer he lived on the island, the more realistic his view became. When commercial galleries from Europe opened branches in Denpasar and persuaded local artists to adapt their style so that Western buyers would take a liking to their works, Spies founded the cooperative Pita Maha together with his Balinese friends. To this day, Pita Maha is regarded on the island as a project of Balinese self-liberation from the paternalism of foreign traders. At the height of its existence, Pita Maha enabled one hundred and thirty local artists to sell their works directly to their buyers or their agents, thus preventing a decline in both quality and price.
In 1956, the Puri Lukisan Museum opened in Ubud, the first and still the most important museum of Balinese art. Works from the collections of Gregory Bateson, Margaret Mead and Rudolf Bonnet were exhibited. Spies’ famulus of the first Bali months, Anak Agung Gde Sobrat, not only advanced to become an important Indonesian artist, but also taught at the Yogyakarta School of Art.
In Ubud and many other places on the island, there are not only cultural tourism traps, but also serious artists and dancers.
Perhaps that is precisely its heritage. In an artistry that breaks away from all national and cultural moorings out of devotion to the periphery, to the exotic, and experiences the early revelation that there can only be one home in modernity: life itself.
