Walter Spies, a free-spirited, highly talented painter and musician with a zest for life, hired as a sailor in 1923 and travelled via Java to Bali where he settled in 1927. There, he created fantastic pictures and became the centre of attention for Balinese artists and celebrities like Charlie Chaplin and Vicky Baum, who visited him in his island paradise. For the first time, the fascinating life of this drop-out is presented in a German biography.
He left everything behind: his social status as the son of an industrial magnate, his lover the film director Friedrich Murnau, artist friends like Oskar Kokoschka and Otto Dix. When Walter Spies (1895-1942) immersed himself in the exotic world of Bali, he explored its culture intensively. His magical-realistic paintings revolutionized Balinese art and he continues to be revered in Bali as a brilliant master.
Against the backdrop of a breathtaking landscape, his paintings, drawings and watercolours tell of everyday life, of temple ceremonies, cockfights, market scenes or work in the fields. In the author Michael Schindhelm, Walter Spies has found a biographer who traces his unconventional life artfully and with sensitivity.
Hardcover 248 pages 13.5 x 21 cm (portrait) 1 kg German/Deutsch Hilmer 9783777430232
