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Lea Lafugie: An Avid Traveler Miles Ahead of Her Time
Art expression: Visitors flock to Duta Fine Arts Gallery in Kemang, South Jakarta, to marvel at Lafugie’s art work
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Art expression: Visitors flock to Duta Fine Arts Gallery in Kemang, South Jakarta, to marvel at Lafugie’s art work. Her great great cousin, Christine Lux (left), came all the way from Paris.
Lea Lafugie’s paintings depicting everyday life in Indonesia and elsewhere show the adventures of an extraordinarily brave woman who traveled the world in the early 20th century.
Wandering along the halls of the Duta Fine Arts Gallery — from Lafugie’s sketches to aquarelles to oil paintings — it is obvious she was eager to travel the world and get up close and personal with those she met along the way. A keen observer, she drew portraits of dancers or captured the essence of a village theater performances and scenes of life in rural parts of the regions she visited.
She was driven by her need for adventure, said Didier Hamel, the curator and director of the Duta Fine Arts Gallery. Hamel and French Ambassador Corinne Breuze opened the exhibition “Art & Adventure” displaying Lafugie’s work on Oct. 4.
Hamel said he admired Lafugie for her brave stance on life.
“A fantastic woman, especially at that time!” he said.
Traveling was hard back then — not just because she was a female artist traveling alone.
“Because there were no planes! So she went on foot, by boat, by train, by camel, by horse, by elephant,” Hamel said, adding that back then, even the fact that she, as a woman, went to a school of art was very rare.
Hamel has become an expert on Lafugie’s life since he delved deep into her biography. He published a book on her story, which was launched on the exhibition’s opening night.
“The book is the result of 10 years of work,” he said. “I worked like a detective — that’s the most exciting [part] of my job.”
But he said it was a long time coming; and the book wasn’t complete until he met Christine Lux, Lafugie’s great great cousin who came all the way from Paris to attend the exhibition’s opening night.
“She was a special woman,” Lux said.
She remembers Lafugie’s elaborate apartment where she felt like she was in a different world.
“When I arrived there, I thought I was in a Chinese town,” she recalled her experience as a young child.
Lux also owns a painting titled “Balinese Near The River” that was scanned for the exhibition so it could be displayed here as well.
Lafugie traveled the world and married quite late — at 42 — Lux recalled.
“Her husband was my godfather,” she said.
Portrait of Lea Lafugie painting in her studio in Paris, France in 1930. (Courtesy of Duta Fine Arts Gallery)
Half of the art that’s on display at Duta Fina Arts Gallery is from Lafugie’s time in Indonesia. She was already an avid traveler when she came to the archipelago in 1930 — with countries like Tunisia, Algeria, India and Tibet under her belt. Her works were displayed at two exhibitions in Jakarta and Surabaya in East Java; and she went on to show her art in Singapore, Vietnam and the US, to name a few countries. She also published books on Tibet and numerous articles in magazines and newspapers.
After her death in 1972 in Paris, her art was largely forgotten. According to Hamel’s research, some of her works reappeared again as part of an exhibition in France, but it wasn’t until 2001 “that her paintings were once again valued as true works of art,” he wrote in his book Lea Lafugie, Art & Adventure.
Other visitors were also in awe of her life story.
“She’s a woman of courage. She’s been traveling in very difficult areas of the world, like Tibet, at that time in the 1930s,” French cultural attaché Christian Gaujac said.
“She’s an artist. She’s an explorer and certainly a sort of pioneer,” he added. “Today we are celebrating her as a French artist and her view of the Indonesian everyday life, the people, at that time.”
French Ambassador Breuze remembered seeing some of Lafugie’s works in a museum in Bali, saying it was difficult to choose one favorite over another.
“I like them all,” she said.
Gaujac pauses for a moment and then points to two paintings on the wall. “I like very much the two dancers over there. I’ve been to shows in Bali and for me they represent the movement of the dances in Bali — the colors and everything.”
Lafugie’s works are on display at Duta Fine Arts Gallery until Nov. 7.
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“Art & Adventure”
Lea Lafugie (1890 – 1972)
Oct. 4 to Nov. 7, 2016
Duta Fine Arts Gallery
Jl. Kemang Utara 55A, South Jakarta
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The reporter is an intern at The Jakarta Post.
