Walter Spies: The German Artist Who Shaped Ubud
Walter Spies in Ubud: why his story matters
The story of Walter Spies in Ubud begins with a German painter and musician who settled in the village in 1927 and became one participant in the island’s artistic life during the 1930s. His importance lies in the collaborations he joined. Balinese painters, palace patrons and performers were already shaping their own traditions, and their work changed through exchange rather than through one foreign artist’s direction. For a visitor, the clearest way to understand that history is to look at the art and performance networks around Campuhan, the palace and the villages nearby.
Spies’s name appears beside several well-known parts of Ubud’s cultural history: the Pita Maha artists’ association, the staged form of kecak, and the 1933 film Die Insel der Dämonen. Each of these stories needs more than a single-name credit. Balinese artists and performers supplied the knowledge, skill and artistic decisions that made those collaborations possible.
Walter Spies and Ubud’s artistic circle
Spies was born in Moscow in 1895, to a German family whose father was posted there as a diplomat. He moved to Java in 1923, when the islands were the Dutch East Indies, and lived in Yogyakarta before settling in Ubud in 1927. He lived for about nine years at the confluence of two rivers in Campuhan, in a green valley that is quieter than the central streets.
Ubud’s artistic activity did not begin with Spies. Painters in and around the village were already working in established Balinese forms, including narrative compositions connected with wayang stories and temple life. Palace support, village networks and the everyday need for images in ritual settings sustained artistic skill. Spies brought another set of visual habits, materials and outside connections into that environment, and he worked as a painter and as a musician. His European background shaped how he framed some subjects, but the result was not a simple replacement of Balinese conventions.
Rudolf Bonnet, a Dutch painter, arrived in Bali in 1929 and met Spies on arrival. He later took over Spies’s former studio in Ubud after Spies moved to Campuhan. Balinese artists and members of Ubud’s royal family helped mediate the exchange. Tjokorda Gde Raka Sukawati, a member of the Ubud royal household, invited Bonnet to live in Ubud, and his brother Tjokorda Gde Agung Sukawati supported artistic activity and relationships across the court and surrounding villages. I Gusti Nyoman Lempad, a leading Balinese artist, was a senior figure in his own right. Naming these people matters: the story was a network, not a visiting European discovering an art that had been waiting for him.
Pita Maha made artistic exchange collective
Pita Maha was founded in Ubud on 29 January 1936 by Bonnet, Spies and Tjokorda Gde Agung Sukawati, with Lempad among the figures who supported its work. Its purpose was to bring Balinese art to a wider audience. The association selected artists whose work could be exhibited and sold, and its members showed their pieces in exhibitions elsewhere in the Dutch East Indies, in the Netherlands and in the United States.
Meetings gave artists a place to show work and to discuss it with one another. The system helped Balinese artists find broader audiences and new markets, while also creating standards for which work was promoted. Pita Maha was therefore both a platform and a filter. Its members gained visibility, but selection and the tastes of patrons, organisers and outside buyers shaped what became recognised as modern Balinese art.
Subject matter shifted from conventional wayang themes towards more varied scenes of people, landscapes and village life. That shift is useful but incomplete. Artists did not all adopt one look. A painter might draw on European perspective or naturalistic bodies while retaining local narrative structure, colour choices or ritual references. Individual artists developed recognisable approaches, and the association’s collective activity did not erase their differences.
Spies contributed by advising, discussing and helping create routes to audiences, but Balinese artists made the paintings and sustained their own practices. Their work was not merely an illustration of an outsider’s taste. A visitor comparing works from this era should look at how artists organise space, how figures relate to the landscape, and whether a scene belongs to a story, a village setting or an imagined natural world. Those choices reveal distinct artistic voices more clearly than the broad label “Ubud style”.
The association did not last through the war. Pita Maha was dissolved in 1942, which brought an end to the most organised phase of the Ubud exchange. The collective years still shape how the period is remembered, because they gave Balinese painters a structured route into exhibitions and sales.
How much did Spies shape the Ubud painting style?
Spies influenced the environment in which painting was discussed and circulated, but he was not the sole author of a single Ubud style. The association included Balinese leadership and artists with individual methods, and related artistic activity extended beyond Ubud itself. European visitors, collectors and writers also helped carry selected images abroad. That attention brought opportunity while turning a diverse body of work into a marketable picture of Bali for foreign audiences.
This tension is important when reading the history now. Wider recognition could give artists access to buyers and exhibitions, yet outside demand could favour scenes that matched visitors’ expectations of an untouched, timeless island. The artistic exchange was real, but it happened within unequal colonial conditions and a growing tourist economy. Spies’s position as a European resident gave him forms of access and influence not shared equally by Balinese painters. Giving credit to collaboration need not hide that imbalance; it makes the roles and conditions clearer.
Rather than asking whether Spies created modern Balinese art, a more useful question is what changed through contact among artists, patrons and audiences. Painting subjects broadened, styles became more individually recognisable, and networks for exhibiting and selling work expanded. Balinese painters used, adapted or rejected ideas in their own ways. That process is more complex than a line of influence running from Spies to local artists.
Spies, Wayan Limbak and the development of kecak
Kecak is linked with Spies because he worked with the Balinese dancer Wayan Limbak to turn a ritual chant into a staged drama. The form grew out of the sanghyang, a trance-inducing ritual in which a male chorus sang and moved. In the 1930s Spies adapted it into a Ramayana-based dramatic performance with dance, intended for audiences of visitors. The chorus’s rhythmic “cak” calls and the presence of a central dancer make the form instantly recognisable.
The exact contribution each man made is not settled, so it is inaccurate to say that Spies invented kecak. The scholar I Wayan Dibia argues that Balinese performers were already developing the form before Spies arrived on the island. In his account, Limbak had added baris movements to the leader’s role during the 1920s, and Spies liked the innovation and suggested a Ramayana-based spectacle with a chorus rather than gamelan. Limbak later helped spread the dance by arranging internationally touring performances by Balinese groups.
The distinction matters when a visitor sees a staged performance today. Kecak belongs to a living performance tradition with several histories, not simply to a 1930s invention by one European resident. Spies’s interest and collaboration helped shape a version that could travel to new audiences; Balinese performers made it vivid, skilled and transmissible.
Ubud remains a practical place to encounter Balinese dance in performance, but one evening’s show cannot stand in for the many purposes dance serves across the island. Balinese dance forms and their settings offer a wider frame for distinguishing a staged presentation from dance connected with community or ceremonial life. At a performance, watch how the chorus keeps its pulse and coordination while the dancer’s gestures carry narrative detail. That interplay is what makes kecak more than a collection of dramatic poses.
Music, writing and the film made in Bedulu
Spies was also a musician with a sustained interest in gamelan. His work and conversations intersected with those of the composer Colin McPhee, who spent most of the 1930s in Bali and studied its music closely. McPhee’s memoir A House in Bali, first published in 1947, describes his years on the island and his engagement with Balinese music.
Spies also collaborated on Die Insel der Dämonen, released in 1933 and directed by Friedrich Dalsheim. The film was shot in and around Bedulu in 1931 and 1932 and combined a scripted story with scenes of village life. The expedition leader Victor von Plessen worked on the project with Dalsheim and Spies. Balinese non-actors took part in the film, and Spies choreographed its dance sequences, including the kecak scenes. The film shows performance and village imagery from the period, but it is also a constructed work made for foreign viewers, and it should not be treated as an unfiltered portrait of Bali.
Finding the history around Campuhan and central Ubud
Campuhan is the most direct geographical link between Spies and a visitor’s walk through Ubud. He lived in the area around the river confluence, and the ridge above the valley gives a sense of the green landscape beyond the town centre. The modern path is a walk in its own right, rather than a museum route or a guaranteed view of his former home. The Campuhan Ridge Walk is a good way to plan that landscape visit separately from the history.
The Ubud palace was closely connected to the artistic circle through its royal patrons and their support of local artists. The palace is in the centre of the village, and Campuhan is a separate walk from it. Seeing both in one outing helps orient the story: the court offered a place for patronage and cultural exchange, while artists’ homes and studios sat within a wider village landscape. Ubud Palace and its historic setting provides context for the royal family’s role.
For paintings, seek out collections in Ubud that interpret Balinese art across generations. The Museum Puri Lukisan holds a collection that Bonnet and Tjokorda Gde Agung Sukawati assembled, and the Neka Art Museum includes a display devoted to Bonnet’s Dutch colleague Willem Hofker. Their broader context is useful because Spies’s legacy is easier to understand beside works by Balinese artists than in isolation. Do not assume that a particular museum currently displays a particular Spies painting, because exhibition arrangements change.
If you have only a short time, choose one focused pairing: Campuhan and a collection visit for landscape and painting, or the palace area and a dance performance for patronage and performance. A single morning can connect the ridge setting with the art story, while an evening performance gives a different kind of evidence: rhythm, gesture, group coordination and audience-facing staging. Balinese culture places Ubud’s art and dance within the island’s broader cultural life.
What visitors should notice and how to behave
When looking at a painting, take time to notice who made it and what the image is doing, rather than treating every work as a souvenir view of Bali. A narrative painting may compress figures, buildings and events into a dense surface, while another may use depth and light to make a landscape feel observed. These are choices by artists, not evidence that one technique is more authentic than another. If a label identifies an artist, keep that attribution attached to the work rather than assigning it to the circle in general.
At a performance, ask before photographing, especially in a palace courtyard or another setting with its own rules. Follow the organiser’s guidance on where to sit, when to move and whether photography is permitted. In palace areas, dress modestly and respect barriers or spaces that are not open to visitors. A performance may use visual elements with religious or community significance, so attentive viewing is preferable to stepping into the playing area or interrupting the performers for a closer photograph.
Hold two ideas together when you visit: Spies was a notable collaborator whose work and connections affected how Balinese art reached wider audiences, and the artistic traditions he encountered belonged to Balinese people before, during and after his time in Ubud. His legacy is best understood through specific partnerships, institutions and works, not as a claim of sole authorship.
Why did Walter Spies leave Ubud?
After about nine years at Campuhan, Spies moved to Iseh in Karangasem. He had built what he described as a mountain hut there in 1937. The move changed where he lived, but it did not erase his connections to Ubud’s artistic community or to the association’s work, and Bonnet continued to work in Ubud.
How did Walter Spies die?
After the Japanese attack on the Dutch East Indies, Dutch authorities interned German men, and Spies was among them. He was aboard the Van Imhoff when it was hit by a Japanese bomb on 19 January 1942. The ship’s crew had been ordered not to evacuate the German internees, and most of the prisoners on board, including Spies, drowned. His death is part of the wider wartime tragedy that ended the prewar period in which the Ubud circle had formed.
The novel Island of Demons by Nigel Barley, published in 2009, was loosely inspired by Spies’s life, which gives later readers another route into his story. Whatever form a retelling takes, the most reliable understanding of Spies comes from the documented partnerships with Balinese artists, the Pita Maha years and the films and performances that carried Ubud’s culture to wider audiences.
For more on this area, see Bali’s History: Kingdoms, Colonial Campaigns and Episodes.
Related reading: mengwi kingdom, bali in the indonesian revolution, japanese occupation bali.