While many Australians have visited Indonesia, especially the holiday island of Bali, and many are aware of the traditional ritualistic art which taps into religion and folk art conventions epitomised at the recent exhibition at the National Gallery of Australia, Bali: Island of the gods

Contemporary Indonesian art by artists, including Dadang Christanto, Eko Nugroho and FX Harsono, have also penetrated the Australian exhibition circuit and are represented in Australian museum collections. However, the generation of modernists, which emerged between the wars and gained maturity in the 1950s and the 1960s has had little exposure in Australia. It is essentially this generation of artists that is represented in this exhibition. The new exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery consists of 35 works from the National Gallery of Indonesia and brings together some of the household names in modern Indonesian art, including S. Sudjojono, Hendra Gunawan and Affandi, with examples of their art drawn from over half a century from 1930 to the 1980s. A number of contemporary, and perhaps less interesting works, are tacked on at the end of the exhibition. Clearly an exhibition of contemporary Indonesian portraiture is something that we should look forward to in the future.

Until about 1930 many Indonesian artists worked in relative isolation from developments in modern European art with information only filtering through in reproductions in art magazines such as Studio from London. In the 1930s exhibitions were held in Batavia (today's Jakarta) featuring the work of the Post-Impressionists and European modernists from Kandinsky to Picasso. Within a couple of decades appeared the first wave of Indonesian expressionists with Affandi (1907-1990) one of the most vivid personalities. His Potret Diri dan Pipanya, (Self-portrait with pipe) 1971, is boldly expressive, with thick impasto paintwork and emotionally charged brushstrokes. Working in a style called "squeezing the tube", by the 1950s Affandi's art received wide recognition and the artist travelled for prolonged periods of time to India, Europe and America, exhibiting at the São Paulo Biennale, as well as the biennales in Brazil and Venice. A review in the Time magazine in 1953 commented on his method of work. "Affandi never learned to use a palette, dislikes brushes. Instead, he squeezes paint on to his thumb, then smears it around the canvas. He will often spend a week studying a subject, but the actual painting seldom takes longer than 90 furious minutes. 'After about an hour,' he says, 'I usually feel my emotions declining. It's better to stop then. The painting is finished'."

Living in Yogyakarta, he established his own house museum under a banana-shaped roof on the banks of the Gajah Wong River and also established the Affandi Foundation, which has done much to perpetuate his memory and disseminate his reputation as one of the towering giants of Indonesian expressionist art. His house museum has now become a local tourist attraction.

Affandi flirted with political art and although he engaged with a social reality, he once famously said to his artist daughter, Kartika, who pointed to a human corpse on a street in India as a subject for her father's work, that he needed inspiration, not illustration. Sudjana Kerton (1922-1994) joined the ranks of the Indonesian revolution and supported the anti-Dutch movements. He was inspired by the Mexican muralists and settled for a prolonged period of time in New York before returning to Indonesia in 1976, when it was safe to do so, and settled in Bandung. His painting Senja (Dusk), 1987, in this exhibition, has the unlikely hero of the duck farmer returning home, his face distorted, his body misshapen through years of labour, while the mood is captured by that of the dying sun. The pattern of the ducks is regimented geometrically into half of the composition and effectively this is contrasted by darkness in the other half with the setting sun.

Hendra Gunawan (1918-1983) was a political intellectual who actively fought with 'Poetera' (Centre of Popular Power) led by Sukarno and was an active member of 'Persagi' (The Association of Indonesian Painters), an organisation founded by S. Soedjojono and Agus Djaya in 1938. He was incarcerated in the 1960s during the crackdown on the PKI (Indonesian Communist Party) and was not released until 1978. The painting in this exhibition, Menjuliti Petai, (prosaically translated as Peeling stinky beans) 1957, belongs to his early celebration of the life of working people in a strangely surreal manner where the space appears to be imbued with that which lies beyond the realm of the rational. Although much of his art has been lost or wilfully destroyed, in Indonesian art history he remains one of those larger than life characters whose biography has attracted many fanciful interpretations.

Harijadi Sumodidjojo (1919-1997) was a major realist revolutionary artist represented in this exhibition by his striking self-portrait from 1955. He also joined the cause of Sukarno and suffered oppression. In Mexico he met the great muralist Siqueiros and brought back these techniques and artistic strategies to Indonesia, but political oppression prevented him from completing his dream of executing for the National Museum a 30-panel diorama of Indonesian history with only about five scenes completed. As a revolutionary, he was committed to the idea that art was to serve the people, rather than to glorify a personality cult. One could contrast this painting with the self-portrait on the neighbouring wall by Sunarto PR, a delicate drawing wonderfully worked in pastels on paper and dated 1957. Both are introspective, but if the first focuses on the artist in society, the 'idea' of the artist, the latter examines the inner personality of the artist as a troubled young individual.

Some of the more recent works in this exhibition, including the painting Asti, 1980, by Soedibio (1912-1981), a slightly academic and illustrative manner sets in where the Cubistically arranged space of the background is contrasted with the highly figurative treatment of the centrally placed little girl, who is the artist's daughter. Although originally he was a member of the 'Persagi' circle and spent time in Dutch military detention, much of his early work was destroyed in a flood in 1966, and the earlier surrealist tendency of his art was replaced with a growing classicism evident in this piece. S. Sudjojono is another of the major figures of the Indonesian modernist movement represented in this exhibition by sensitive portraits of his two wives with their strong sense of psychological presence.

In many ways, Masters of Modern Indonesian Portraiture, is a groundbreaking exhibition which starts to fill in our knowledge of an episode in the art of Australia's most populous neighbour and hopefully this will be an ongoing and reciprocal relationship between the National Portrait Gallery of Australia and the National Gallery of Australia. This exhibition also marks the first initiative by the newish director of the National Portrait gallery, Angus Trumble, although we may need to wait the best part of another year before his artistic vision is given its full expression.

Masters of Modern Indonesian Portraiture is on at the National Portrait Gallery and closes on October 15.