Neka Art Museum

This guide to the Neka Art Museum in Ubud follows Pande Wayan Suteja Neka, a shopkeeper's son training to become a teacher, who watched Bali's finest paintings get bought up by foreign visitors, one canvas at a time. Two Dutch painters, Rudolf Bonnet and Arie Smit, taught him what set an extraordinary painting apart from a merely pretty one. In 1975, he and Bonnet traveled together through Europe's museum halls, an idea already forming in his mind about what should stay in Bali.