(Re)Collecting: Southeast Asia at the Johnson Museum

Born in Riga, Latvia, to an upper-middle-class Jewish family in 1901, Claire Holt is known by many for many different things. During her lifetime, she had moved across the world, from Riga to Moscow, to Paris, to New York, then to the Dutch East Indies in the 1930s before she went to work for the U.S. Government intelligence in the 1940s, and subsequently to Ithaca where she joined Cornell University’s Department of Southeast Asian Studies until she died in 1970. Claire had been a dancer, journalist, traveler, archaeologist, teacher, sculptor, translator, scholar, and a government official throughout her life. Claire Holt first arrived in the Dutch East Indies in Bali in 1930. She spent most of the decade studying Javanese dance, exploring Hindu-Buddhist temples, and working and living with Wilhelm Frederik Stutterheim (1892-1942), a leading Dutch archaeologist and scholar. During World War II, Claire Holt fled to New York with her son. In New York, she frequently gave a lecture on Javanese dance and culture. She also worked for an anthropologist Margaret Mead at the American Museum of Natural History and helped established the East Indies Institute. During the height of the war that impacted Southeast Asia in the early 1940s, Claire Holt taught at the Navy School for the Military Government to prepare soldiers to be dispatched in the region. Subsequently, she worked at the State Department in the Far East Division of the Office of Strategic Services, now named the Central Intelligence Agency.

In 1955 Claire Holt had the opportunity to return to independence Indonesia under the sponsorship of Cornell University and the Rockefeller Foundation to research art in Indonesia after the war. From her research trip that ended in mid-March 1957, combined with her previous trips to the Indies, Claire Holt collected and produced numerous photographic reproductions of Javanese dances, shadow puppets, temples, and modern artists and artworks. Many of there are featured in her influential book, Art in Indonesia: Continuities and Change, published by Cornell University Press in 1967. Claire Holt returned to Indonesia once again for a few weeks in 1969, revisiting places in Java and Bali that she loved before she passed away in 1970. Claire Holt passed many of her wayang collection to her student, Ben Anderson, who later gifted most of them to the Johnson Museum.