javafred.net

 
 

 
     r e a d i n g s

 

 

Copyright 2001 by Tjandra Kerton

 

Theft of My Father's Paintings

by Tjandra Kerton
(daughter of the late Sudjana Kerton)

Bandung, February 2001

In the early morning hours of 3 February 1997 nineteen oil paintings by Sudjana Kerton were stolen from the house of the Kerton family. At the time of this writing,
none of them had yet been recovered.

(As of 2007, many have since been recovered
or "bought back" -- Javafred)

 

The theft was discovered by one of the gallery employees at approximately 5:30 am, as she noted the front gallery door was open. On inspection, it was discovered that the lock had been broken and forced open as well as one of the windows. Each of the paintings was removed by cutting the wire with which it was hung on the wall. All 19 frames had been left on the hillside below the house.

As to the people in the house the night of the theft, there were six men who had worked for two days installing new lighting fixtures in the gallery and had slept in the house, three men who were hired to repair the brick wall on the front of the gallery (these nine men had been brought from Jakarta), one male and two female employees (servants) of the house and gallery, my mother (Mrs. Louise Kerton, widow of the artist Sudjana Kerton). The gallery is a separate building, but attached to the house. Everyone was sleeping in the house area, not in the gallery. The front door of the gallery is on the opposite side of the gallery is on the opposite side of the area where everyone was sleeping. Since this was the fasting month for Moslems, everyone who was fasting arose at 2:30 am and made breakfast and ate. Of the group of six, only one was fasting, but he did not get up to eat. All the people in the house were familiar with the interior of the gallery and the general area. The police were called on discovery of the theft.

As background information, my mother and I had organized a retrospective exhibition of the my father’s works and it was shown in Jakarta from 22 November through 15 December 1996.

To help us with the organization of the exhibit, we had a group of young artists from the prestigious Bandung Institute of Technology, the curator was one of the teachers in the arts department. The curator did the work of organizing and selecting his staff. His responsibility was to keep a record of expenses and would be reimbursed after the end of the show. He was slow in preparing this report, finally giving us his report on 1 February. Meanwhile his workers had not been paid for the their work. We heard that some of them had been asking for their funds which they had been promised; it is possible that the curator gave the excuse that we would not pay him. It is possible that a disgruntled worker might have stolen the paintings out of the gallery. Incidentally, the wooden stretchers to which the paintings were attached were found by the police on the property next door nearly a week after the theft; the police had not looked before for them, in fact, their investigation was superficial.

During the exhibition all members of the group of six (electricians) were working for the gallery (Gedung Pameran Seni Rupa Depdikbud) in which we had the exhibit. They were well acquainted with the curator and his group during those three weeks. It is possible some kind of scheme was devised then.

Also during the exhibit a group of Singaporean Chinese came to the exhibit and said they would buy a large number of paintings, in fact they put SOLD signs on at least 15 paintings, thus keeping potential buyers from buying. A down payment was promised but not given. At the end they tried to bargain for a 30% discount, and after we told them we could not give more than a 10% discount, they refused to buy. Of the paintings stolen, seven were in this group of cancelled paintings.

The leader of the this group, an Indonesian Chinese woman who seems to be dealing in buying and selling paintings and other art objects, was angry as they had apparently already gotten buyers. This group, consisting of the woman and two men, had come to our gallery starting in mid 1996, wanting to buy many of our paintings. They ended up, between the three of them, buying almost 20 paintings before they exhibition. She said she was buying the paintings for an "aunt" of hers, who turned out to be the wife of the director of a major financial institution in Jakarta, and was not indeed any relation at all. We have also been suspicious of her, as she seemed to a rather ruthless type (especially when she was bargaining for as low prices as she could get) and did get to know the people working at the National Gallery.

In early 1997, however, after the theft had occurred, we were visited by the two Singaporean men, who said that they had not willingly cancelled on their previous purchases, but had been "forced" to do so by the "leader" of their group. They ended up buying more works from us in 1997 up to early 1998.

These are some of the facts about the theft. One must always keep in mind that in Indonesia, one might expect to find the strange, unexpected and just plain stupid. The police suspect the motive could be revenge and anger, and the assumption that we would not go to the police. However, nothing makes sense. At present the chief of Intelligence Dept. for West Java is working on the case, at least checking what the local police are doing. The only common feature of all the paintings stolen is that they are the smallest ones and were oils, not watercolors, and the thieves were not selective in quality, some paintings had not been for sale or were never exhibited.

Bandung, March 1997.

 

 

 

What happened in the months after the theft in 1997?

In August, we were contacted by a man who had come to the gallery the previous week with a collector from Semarang and two of his friends, a Ms. Donna and a Mr. Djadjat. He suggested during their visit that we perhaps could buy the paintings back from whoever had them and then pay out some money. When he contacted us by phone a week later he said that he had gotten information about the stolen paintings and wanted to come to Bandung to discuss it with us. He never showed up.

In November we were contacted by a dealer through the manager of one of the art galleries in Bandung. The dealer wanted to make a deal with us in that a collector friend of his from Jakarta was a "great fan of S. Kerton paintings," and had been phoned by someone who offered a couple of the stolen paintings to him. His collector friend said he wouldn’t buy them directly from this person, but suggested that perhaps these paintings could be given back to us and then we would sell them to him, at discounted prices of course, with the certificates. We said we’d think about this, but the dealer never contacted us again.

In December a Bandung art dealer, who claims to be a relative of my father, and his mother came up to our gallery as if to get "re-acquainted" with us and to gain our trust. At this time this person exchanged a so-called old painting signed "S. Kerton" dated 1949, which he said had been in the keeping of other relatives and recently was sold to him, with one of the paintings in our collection. While signing our guest book, this person noticed some names and referred to them as members of a "mafia".

On 2 February 1998 the art dealer showed up again, this time with a proposal that we make fakes of the stolen paintings so that we could sell them and the certificates and pass them off as the originals so that we could still make money even though the original paintings could not be recovered. H acted as if there was no more hope of getting back the original stolen paintings and that we might as well forget about them. We suspect that he actually has them or knows where they are, and that making the fakes is just a ruse/trick to get the certificates from us so that he will be able to sell the stolen paintings legitimately, just like the other dealer wanted to do.

On 6 April 1998 I happened to be at an exhibition of Sudjojono’s works at Lippo Karawaci, where I met by accident some art dealers, one of whom told me that he had been offered 12 of my father’s paintings by someone from Ciputat who said that the actual paintings were with someone in Bekasi. He didn’t know for sure if these 12 paintings were the stolen ones – they could even have been fakes – but he was pretty sure that they were not legitimate paintings because he said that art dealers do no release/sell paintings in large amounts at a time.

The years 1998 –2000 were relatively quiet with regard to the stolen paintings. There was one interesting happening, though. One of the collectors that bought two of my father’s paintings at the 1996 exhibition and who is from one of the largest conglomerates in Indonesia, suddenly called me out of the blue in mid 1999 and said she knew of the party who had somehow gotten hold of the stolen paintings without having known they were stolen. The gist of it was that they wanted to do some kind of deal. I agreed to meet with her and with a known Indonesian art critic (who is also known for collecting artwork) to discuss this further. However, nothing came of this. Close to the end of 1999, another collector of our artwork, who had been one of the Singaporean buyers along with the woman who had been angry with during the 1996 exhibition, contacted us and said that he also knew of who had the paintings and offered to be the "go-between". My mother and I immediately concluded that the party who as said to have the stolen paintings was indeed the woman who had been so angry and had cancelled her purchases back in 1996. However, there is no proof that this is the case. After we talked to this man in late 1999, there was no further word. We happened to see him again in 2000 and he said that the people who had the paintings decided against using him as a go-between; they wanted to approach us themselves, but this has not happened.

We are now left with a series of tantalizing yet mysterious events surrounding this theft, which lead to all sorts of scenarios and theories, and we have been feeling so frustrated as nothing as yet can be proved. My brother, who lives in the U.S, has been exhorting us to move back to the U.S. as he feels that it’s a bad thing to be mixed up in some crime here. But we can’t make any move (if that’s indeed what we decide to do) until we can know for sure one way or another.

The police have not done a very thorough investigation, and as at present the case is lying dormant in the local police station. The police were practically good for nothing, and in the beginning were their usual awful selves, asking us for money and so forth. As has been pointed out in the seminar that I attended recently on art crimes in Indonesia, however, the police have almost no experience in handling this kind of crime.

July, 2001: we plan to hold an exhibition of my father’s artwork on paper, such as his war-time sketches, drawings, and graphics of his New York study period. We will also include reproductions of the stolen artwork to be displayed for the public to see. We have a strong hunch that at least some of the stolen artwork is with certain parties/individuals/collectors in Jakarta and hopefully they will be coming to the exhibition. If any of the displayed reproductions are recognized as being in any of their collections, we will then hopefully be getting some feedback and perhaps some "deals" can be made!