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Leo Haks
Balinese collection and the Australian Museum (Sydney)
2012
These texts 'borrowed' from the Australian Museum site
Words by Dr Stan Florek:
Generous donor of Balinese Modernist Art visits Australian Museum.
On Monday 3 December 2012 we had the pleasure of welcoming Leo Haks and his partner Colleen Dallimore who came to visit us at the Australian Museum.
This year Leo Haks, collector and connoisseur of Indonesian art, donated to the Museum over 100 Balinese Modernist paintings. He played an important role in recognising and defining this interesting art movement.
Leo termed it the Pre-War Modernists Paintings (1928–1942) and his collection includes a substantial portion of paintings originally assembled in the 1930s by anthropologists Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson as well as Swiss artist, and long-time resident in Bali, Theo Meier.
And, significantly, the collection includes paintings from the late 1920s and the early 1930s, a period before outsiders took any notice of this emerging art current.100 paintings represent a very good sample of the Modernist art movement in Bali. They are well documented, making them an important source for exhibitions, community programs and research.
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Accompanied by Adrian Vickers and Siobhan Campbell, academics from the University of Sydney and specialists in Balinese art, our visitors examined parts of the Museum’s anthropology collections, including Balinese paintings and carvings, early Maori material, which impressed Colleen immensely, and the Papunya paintings.
Both Leo and Colleen have a long association with art, its creation, collection, study and publication. Their association includes paintings, photography, textiles and other forms of visual art, ranging from Indonesia to China and from the Pacific through to New Zealand and Aboriginal Australia.
Exploring collections with our guests always brings different dimensions, issues and associations that may not have been previously apparent. So we discussed and marvelled about art, cultures, and human needs for meaning. We contemplated how well the Australian Museum is placed to benefit from and to contribute to the Asian Century – not a theory but a reality already upon us.
I had the clear impression that Leo and Colleen enjoyed their visit and were pleased to see how accessible and well cared for our anthropology collections are.
Balinese Paintings:
Leo Haks generously donated over 100 paintings from his collection to the Australian Museum in 2012.
Leo Haks is a photographer, collector and connoisseur of Indonesian art. In 2007 the National Gallery of Australia acquired his collection of Indonesian photographs taken from the 1860s to the 1940s, describing it as one of the most significant acquisitions undertaken by the Gallery.
One of his other passions, dating back to the 1970s, was collecting and studying the Pre-War Modernists Paintings from Bali (1928–1942).
Through several decades of perseverance, initially with his business partner Guus Maris, Leo Haks built an important collection of several hundred Pre-War Modernist Paintings. This collection included a significant portion of works on paper initially collected by anthropologists Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson in the second half of the 1930s, as well as Theo Meier’s collection from the same period.
In addition Leo Haks obtained some earlier paintings and drawings predating artwork assembled by Mead, Beatson and Meier. In the 1990s these paintings were displayed in a series of exhibitions in the Netherlands and Indonesia.
Approaching his retirement from full time professional work Leo Haks attempted to place his important collection in a public institution, a museum or a gallery. This, coinciding with the effect of the global financial crisis of the late 2000s proved extremely difficult. Consequently Haks sold a large part of his collection at an auction in Singapore in 2011.
He generously donated over 100 remaining paintings to the Australian Museum in 2012 where, together with the Anthony Forge collection of classical paintings, it forms the core of the Museum’s Balinese art.
More on Leo Haks: click here
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