While batik permeates the lives of people throughout the archipelago, the nation’s most famed traditional textile has flourished across the globe, including in Poland, where the Indonesian art has been practiced for over a century.
Photos by Maria Wronska-Friend
Maria Wronska-Friend has made a career studying textiles and batik. However, the anthropologist and museum curator at Australia’s James Cook University says that she first encountered batik in a museum in her native Poland. Local collectors, she says, have long treasured Indonesian batik, and the textile has long inspired Polish artisans.
The story that Wronska-Friend tells is remarkable. Polish botanists working for the Dutch in Bogor, West Java, in the late 19th century were surprised to encounter batik textiles, which they said resembled a similar wax-dyeing technique Polish people used to decorate Easter eggs. The samples of Indonesian batik that they brought back to Poland, along with a contemporary Dutch vogue for batik, triggered a creative movement. Batik, as Wronska-Friend says, quickly made the jump from eggshell to cloth in Poland.
By the 1920s, there were three how-to books about Javanese batik published in Poland. Polish artisans even started to use Javanese-style canting (wax pens), as opposed to their traditional tools. In Cracow between 1913 and 1925, there were workshops, some comprised of teenaged girls, where artisans made batik textiles adopted from patterns almost indistinguishable from those in Indonesia. Contemporary Polish artists still use wax-resist fabric dying, albeit to make large-scale paintings.
Wronska-Friend recently spoke about this unexpected cultural exchange at the Polish ambassador’s residence in Jakarta. She was in town to launch her book Javanese Batik to the World, which features text in English and Indonesian. It is currently available in local bookstores along with her first book, Art Drawn with Wax: Batik in Java and Poland.
Javanese Batik explores how Indonesian-style batik has taken hold in places as diverse as West Africa, where the textile trade helped introduce the technique, to Europe, penchant where a turn-of-the-19th-century penchant for Orientalism prompted its rise.
Indonesia Design interviewed Wronska- Friend about her research. Here’s what we found out.
What was the most intriguing discovery you made about how batik has travelled the world?
India is recognised as one of the ancient centres of batik technique in the world and many people believe that batik of Java has its roots in that country. In the 19th century, as a result of the mass-import of British printed fabrics, some of the textile traditions of India disappeared. One of them was the Indian batik technique.
When Rabindranath Tagore, the famous Indian poet, visited Java in 1927, he was astonished to see that batik still flourished in Indonesia. He organised a collection of these fabrics and used them in India as a teaching aid to revive local batik. I learned about this Indian-Indonesian batik link only in 2011, when I attended a conference in Calcutta commemorating 150th anniversary of Tagore’s birth.
How does batik actually spread across cultures?
The most important factor responsible for the successful transmission of batik is the intellectual readiness of the other society to appreciate the uniqueness of art created by the human hand. In the West, crafts and the applied arts are driven by extremes. At times, we depend on technology and mass-produced objects, while at other times people favour the unique touch of human hand. Batik is easily accepted and has gained many followers in this second case. For example, towards the end of the 19th century the ideas of [Arts and Crafts Movement founders] Ruskin and Morris in support of handwork became popular all over Europe. Then, around 1890, the batik technique was successfully introduced to the Western arts, as it paralleled the European desire to create unique, hand- made objects.
A similar process took place in Australia in the 1970s. It was the time of a strong interest in crafts and hand-made objects—and it was at that time that batik was very successfully introduced to the Aboriginal communities of central desert. Batik nowadays is only rarely made by Aboriginal people, as acrylic paintings, decorated with the same patterns as batik fabrics, fetch a much higher price—and they are much faster to produce.
Is batik a vector for other forms of cultural exchange?
The fact that batik techniques have become popular in so many countries, encouraged many people from outside Indonesia to study Javanese culture or to come and visit the country. This trend had already started in the early 20th century when various European and American craftsmen decided to visit Indonesia to study this technique “at its source”.
At the same time, in Europe, there was a renewed interest in Oriental arts, including those of the Indonesian islands. Many artists became fascinated with gamelan music, wayang, dance, etc. This trend was so strong that some art historians call it “Javanism”, similar to “Japonism”—an interest in the arts of Japan.