Education
His family moved in 1924 to Rotterdam, where Smit eventually studied graphic design at the Academy of Arts.
His family moved in 1924 to Rotterdam, where Smit eventually studied graphic design at the Academy of Arts.
Smit was the third of eight children of a trader in cheese and confectionery in Zaandam. In his youth he was most inspired by the work of three artists named Paul (Signac, Gauguin and Cézanne). In 1938 he joined the Royal Netherlands East Indies Army.
After three months he was sent to the Dutch East Indies, where he worked as a lithographer for the Dutch army"s Topographical Service in Batavia, engraving relief maps of the archipelago.
Etching nese mountains onto maps ignited his desire to one day go to In early 1942 Smit was transferred to the infantry in East Java, but was soon captured by the invading Japanese forces. He spent three and a half years in forced labor camps building roads, bridges, and railways on the Burma Railway in Thailand, and Burma.
After the war ended in 1945, Smit was released and returned in January 1946 to the new Republic of Indonesia. He became an Indonesian citizen in 1951 and taught graphics and lithography at the Institut Teknologi Bandung in West Java.
In his spare time he criss-crossed Java as a painter and in 1948 had his first exhibition in Jakarta.
On invitation by the Dutch artist Rudolf Bonnet he finally visited in 1956, together with Dutch artist Auke Sonnega. He soon met art dealer James (Jimmy) Clarence Pandy, who ran a gallery and souvenir shop. Pandy invited Smit to stay in a house on stilts at the beach of Sanur.
Smit and Pandy remained friends and formed a partnership.
Pandy was well-connected. Sukarno would sometimes bring his state guests to his gallery.
With his love for bright colors, Smit was captured by the nese landscapes in its "riotous light", and soon decided to stay to depict its villages, rice terraces, palm trees and temples. In 1960, while touring the village of Penestanan in the Ubud district where he then lived, he came upon some boys drawing in the sand.
Impressed by their talent, Smit invited them to his studio, where they became the first of a growing number of students.
With minimal instruction but lots of encouragement and material support, his pupils created a naive style of genre painting that became known as the "Young Artists" style, which at its peak had 300-400 followers. Though he is considered the father of the movement, its style is quite different than any of Smit"s own styles over the years. From the time of his arrival in, Smit moved some 40 times, "to see what is beyond the next hill".
He stayed longest in his favorite areas of Karangasem and Buleleng.
The Museum in Denpasar and the Penang Museum in Malaysia also have collections of his work. Smit further had exhibits in Jakarta, Singapore, Honolulu and Tokyo.
Arie Smit died on March 23 2016 in Denpasar at the age of 99 years.