Affandi, considered to be the greatest Indonesian Contemporary artist, was born in Cirebon, West Java in 1907. He was the founder of the "Community Artist"(1946) and the "Peoples Artists"(1947) organizations.

In the early 1950’s, he traveled to India on a grant from the Indian government and had solo exhibitions in many Indian cities, before travelling on to England, Holland, Belgium, France and Italy where he also held solo exhibitions. Returning to Indonesia in 1955, he began to teach painting and sculpture at the Indonesian Academy of Fine Art inYogyakarta.

He received an award for his art from the Indonesian government's Ministry of Education and Culture(1969), the Dag Hammarskjoeld award from Italy(1977), an Indonesian government gold medal(1978), as well as an honorary doctorate from the then University of Singapore in 1974. He traveled to Honolulu in 1967 as part of the first East-West Center artist-in-residence program, and had two paintings displayed in the Center’s 1968 "Art of Bali" exhibition. He died in 1990.

Encyclopedia Britannica: The best known painter of Indonesia is the Javanese Affandi. He has used oil paint to execute pictures of Indonesian subjects in a vividly colored Expressionistic impasto (thick application of pigment to the canvas). This European brushwork technique however contains a strong element of the sinuosity of Javanese tradition. As yet, Affandi is the only artist to have attained a personal worldwide reputation."