Being a True Account of Mas Bei Kertowidjojo and the Devil’s Work He Did in Bronze
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One day the Amsterdam antique market was just the Amsterdam
antique market—dusty, respectable, smelling of pipe tobacco and old wood and
the quiet, self-satisfied greed of wealthy men who called their greed collecting.
And then, sometime around 1854, the bronze figures started appearing. Dozens of
them. Ancient-looking things, dark with the patina of centuries, rendered in
the style of Old Javanese Hindu-Buddhist art—all those serene divine faces and
intricate, spiraling ornamentation that made European collectors go absolutely
weak in the knees.
They came with stories, of course. The stories were part of
the product.
Excavated, the sellers would say, lowering their
voices the way you lower your voice in church or at a deathbed. Excavated in
the Kedu Residency. And the buyers—prosperous men in fine coats who should
have known better, who prided themselves on knowing better—would nod slowly,
their eyes already glazing over with the peculiar fever that comes when a rich
man is about to spend money on something he desperately wants to believe in.
They had no idea. Not the faintest ghost of a clue.
The divine figures they were so hungry to own, the ancient
relics they were paying very high prices for—the colonial newspapers
would later use that phrase with a kind of pained delicacy, very high prices,
the way you might describe a particularly embarrassing wound—had been made by a
single man. A craftsman from Surakarta, from the ancient city the Dutch called
Solo, situated in the steaming heart of Central Java. His name was Mas Bei
Kertowidjojo.
And brother, he was good.
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To understand what Kertowidjojo was doing—to really
understand it, in your bones—you need to understand what Java meant to
Europeans in the 1850s. It meant everything. It meant mystery and
antiquity and the gorgeous, unsettling weight of a civilization that had been
building temples when most of Europe was still figuring out which end of the
spear to hold. Ever since Thomas Stamford Raffles had gone scrabbling around
the island and shipped artifacts back to astonished Western audiences, Java had
been the place. The name on everyone’s lips. The dream everyone wanted a
piece of.
And Kedu—Kedu, that lush, green residency in Central
Java, the place where Borobudur rose from the jungle like a stone dream—Kedu
had become something even more specific. It had become a brand. A magic
word. Attach it to an object, any object, and watch its value climb like smoke
toward the ceiling. Excavated in Kedu. Three words that turned bronze
into gold.
The colonial government’s own scholars were feeding the
frenzy, you understand. Men like Frans Carel Wilsen and J.T.G. Brumund were out
there documenting temples and writing breathless reports that circulated all
the way back to Europe. Publications about the Kedu discoveries were passing
from hand to hand in drawing rooms from Amsterdam to London. The market wasn’t
just hungry. It was ravenous.
Kertowidjojo read all of this. Maybe not literally—records
about the man are scarce enough to make you wonder if he went out of his way to
stay scarce—but he read it the way a clever predator reads the landscape. He
understood the hunger. He understood the stories people tell themselves when
they want something badly enough. He understood, in the deep and instinctive
way of a born operator, that the wealthy Europeans who were buying Javanese
antiquities weren’t just buying objects.
They were buying proof. Proof that they were sophisticated.
Proof that they understood the world. Proof that they were the kind of men who
knew value when they saw it.
He was going to sell them that proof. At very high prices.
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The work itself was extraordinary. That’s the part that the
colonial newspapers, with their sputtering racist condescension, couldn’t quite
bring themselves to fully acknowledge even as they were forced to acknowledge
it.
Kertowidjojo didn’t cobble together crude fakes. He didn’t
slap some paint on river rocks and call them ancient. What he produced were
masterworks—objects so convincingly rendered in the classical Javanese style
that they passed through the hands of serious Western collectors and ended up
in serious Western collections without anyone raising so much as an eyebrow.
He used the lost-wax method, cire perdue, the same
ancient technique Javanese metalworkers had been perfecting for centuries. You
start with a clay core—a kern van klei, as the Dutch scholars would
later write it down with their careful, cataloguing hands—shaped into the rough
form of whatever you intend to cast. Then you coat it in black beeswax, the
traditional Javanese kind, lilin in the local tongue. And into that wax
you carve your deity. Your divine figure with its serene face and its elaborate
headdress and its hands positioned in one of the sacred mudras, those precise
finger-gestures that mean specific things to people who know what they mean and
that mean old, expensive, authentic to people who don’t.
Every line. Every curl of ornament. Every fold of the divine
robes. Carved by hand into wax.
Then you coat the whole thing in a slurry of fine charcoal
and sand—this is the secret, this is the part that separates the masters from
the amateurs, this thin carbon layer that keeps the molten bronze from seeping
into the clay pores and coming out rough and bubbled and wrong. Then the outer
clay mold goes on. Then the whole assembly goes into the fire, and the wax melts—noenoes,
the locals called it, bësëm, it flows out through the channels you’ve
left for it, and it burns, and it’s gone—and the space where it used to be
fills with bronze.
And when the mold is broken away and the casting is cleaned
and the surface is worked and the patina is applied—
Well. Then you have something that looks like it came out of
the ground a thousand years ago.
Kertowidjojo followed the old empirical rule that Javanese
metal casters had developed across generations: one katie of wax in the
model would be replaced by ten katie of molten metal. He knew things
about his craft the way a surgeon knows the body—not from books, but from hands,
from years of feeling the resistance of wax under a carving tool, from knowing
by smell and sound and the quality of the heat exactly when the pour was right.
He was running what the colonial report would eventually
call, in that magnificently tone-deaf bureaucratic way, an industry. Not
a workshop. An industry. Systematic. Large-scale. Organized. A machine for
producing ancient Javanese gods on demand.
And shipping them to Amsterdam.
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The first person to smell something wrong was Dr. Conradus
Leemans, director of the Museum of Antiquities in Leiden.
Inconsistencies, the records say. Leemans noticed inconsistencies.
You get the impression of a careful, precise man—the kind who notices when a
hairline is fractionally off, when a detail is just slightly too perfect or not
perfect in quite the right way, when something that ought to feel ancient feels
instead like something performing ancient. He wrote a critical report.
Forwarded it to the colonial government.
The colonial government, to its credit, actually
investigated. Their findings landed in the official 1856 report with the
magnificent Dutch governmental title Verslag van het beheer en den staat der
Koloniën—the Report on the Administration and State of the Colonies—in a
passage so dry and clipped it almost seems designed to hide the enormity of
what it was saying:
Following observations made by the director of the Museum
of Antiquities in Leiden, an investigation was conducted into the origin of
several metal figurines brought to Amsterdam and, according to reports,
excavated in 1854 and 1855 in the Kedu Residency. The inquiry revealed that a
certain Mas Bei KERTOWIDJOJO, residing in Soerakarta, had manufactured these
statues and was still engaged in this industry.
Was still engaged in this industry. The past tense
has a wonderful finality to it, doesn’t it? Like a door closing. Except the
door had been open for years before anyone noticed the draft.
The report sat in a drawer—or the 19th-century Dutch
governmental equivalent of a drawer—until 1859, when it was finally distributed
to parliament members. That same year, the newspapers got hold of it. Java-Bode
out in the Indies. Algemeene Konst- en Letter-bode back in the
Netherlands. And then the thing that bureaucratic language had quietly
concealed was suddenly out in the open, blinking in the light, and the colonial
elites and European art circles were scandalized.
Not just embarrassed. Scandalized. Because there’s a
special quality to the humiliation of sophisticated people who have been fooled
by someone they considered beneath them. It has a different flavor than
ordinary embarrassment. It tastes like something you can’t spit out.
On April 27th, 1859, Java-Bode published its account
of the affair and called Kertowidjojo “the Simonides of Java”—a reference to
Konstantinos Simonides, the notorious Greek forger of biblical manuscripts who
had been making European academics look foolish for years. The comparison was
meant as a kind of backhanded compliment, the way you might grudgingly
acknowledge that the guy who picked your pocket was technically quite
skilled.
And then the paper—and this is where it gets ugly, where the
mask slips and you see the ugly face underneath—wrote the line that tells you
everything you need to know about how the colonial world actually worked:
We had always thought that the forging of antiquities was
an invention of civilized nations; yet here it appears that even people at a
lower stage of development are capable of it…
Even. Even. As if competence, in a brown-skinned man
from Java, was a surprise requiring documentation.
They compared his operation to the cheap souvenir buttons
and fake bullets that got hawked to tourists after Waterloo. But then they were
forced to admit—the facts insisting on themselves, as facts will do—that
Kertowidjojo’s work was nothing like cheap souvenir buttons. His statues had
penetrated the European market. Had attracted serious collectors. Had
fooled people who were paid to know the difference.
The Waterloo button-sellers, whoever they were, would have
been flattered by the comparison.
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Kertowidjojo himself remains a ghost.
That’s the word for it. A ghost. The records are scarce and
scattered and strange, the way records about people who don’t want to be found
often are. His name was common enough in 19th-century Javanese archives that
pinning down exactly which Kertowidjojo this was becomes a scholar’s
nightmare—like trying to identify a specific John Smith from a list of John
Smiths the length of your arm.
Dutch scholar Caroline Drieënhuizen is apparently still
following his trail, and you wish her luck, because the trail is cold and old
and tangled.
What we know: He held the title Mas Bei—short for Mas
Ngabehi—a noble or bureaucratic rank connected to the Surakarta court. This
means he almost certainly came from the priyayi, the Javanese
aristocratic class, or moved in circles close enough to those circles to know
their secrets. It explains things. The access to classical aesthetics. The
command of advanced metalworking knowledge. The organizational capacity to run
what the Dutch, with their exhausted accuracy, called an industry.
He understood how the colonial art market worked the way a
card sharp understands the psychology of the mark. He knew what Western
collectors wanted to believe. He knew the magic words—Kedu, excavated,
ancient—and he knew exactly when to whisper them.
What he wanted, what he really wanted, in whatever
private place a man like that keeps his real thoughts—that’s lost. The colonial
record doesn’t care about his inner life. The colonial record cares about the
fraudulent statues and the embarrassed collectors and the tidy administrative
paragraph that closes the case.
But imagine it anyway, if you can. Imagine a man in
Surakarta in 1854, working by firelight, carving the face of a deity into black
beeswax with the total concentration of the supremely skilled. Imagine him
thinking about the buyers on the other side of the world, their drawing rooms
and their glass display cases and their absolute certainty that they understood
the value of things.
Imagine him smiling.
The statues he made are probably sitting in European
collections right now. Catalogued wrong, maybe. Or maybe just uncatalogued,
sitting in the storage rooms of museums with a little tag that says Javanese,
origin uncertain, c. 9th-11th century, waiting for someone to look closely
enough, carefully enough, to see what Leemans finally saw.
The ghost of Mas Bei Kertowidjojo, laughing in bronze.
He was never caught. There was no arrest, no punishment
mentioned in any record. The colonial government noted the forgery in a dry
paragraph and moved on to other colonial business, the way colonial governments
do. He simply… stopped appearing in the documents.
Went back to the city of Solo. Back to his fire and his wax
and his clay molds and his ten-to-one calculations.
Back to the work.
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