She was once a radio star, a mezzo-soprano whose renditions of classical seriosa tunes were heard nationwide. She also survived turbulent times and public scorn to marry one of Indonesia's greatest modern artists. Bruce Emond finds that Rose Pandanwangi Sudjojono is still closely guarding his legacy 20 years after his death.

Rose Pandanwangi Sudjojono leads the way into the small rectangular building at the back of her home in Pasar Minggu, South Jakarta. Once the studio of her husband, S. Sudjojono, it is today a museum devoted to his life and work.

There are various personal effects on show - the artist's ever-present pipe, hat, glasses, a beloved pair of shoes he bought in London -- but it's the paintings that take pride of place.

Several are portraits of Maya, the only one of their three daughters willing to regularly endure the boredom of sittings. Most are of Rose: She is shown singing, as a reclining nude and in a portrait with her husband, affectionately known as Pak Djon.

"I had gone to see my mother in Holland and he said he was lonely without me, so he painted us together," she said, peering at the work, Our Song After 26 Years, completed a year before Sudjojono's death from lung cancer in 1986.

Although she complains about a hearing problem, Rose, who turns 78 on Jan. 26, is alert and fit. She speaks forcefully about an eventful, often stormy life, recalling names and dates from almost 60 years ago. Only once during a two-hour conversation does her memory fail her as she strives to remember the identity of a composer of seriosa, the uniquely Indonesian light-classical music that she specializes and continues to perform today.

But the name - Soedjasmin -- comes to her a few minutes later.

Rose stops briefly at the large black bust of Sudjojono and his pipe, and then moves to a small sketch on the wall.

On closer inspection, it is the unmistakable "Selamat Datang" (Welcome) statue from the Hotel Indonesia traffic circle. Sudjojono, Rose claims, made the sketch for the design, which was commandeered by city officials and presented to then president Sukarno as their own.

"That's all in the past now, it's all done now," Rose said.

But she also knows how the past comes back to haunt us, continuing to cast a lingering, intrusive shadow over our lives.

For the marriage of Sudjojono and Rose was a cause for scandal long before today's infotainment tabloids made it their business to serve up the infidelities and indiscretions of celebrities for public consumption. Both were already married; Sudjojono had eight children with his first wife, and Rose had three with her husband, an Indonesian she met while studying in the Netherlands.

They were an odd couple in an age of strict conformity - the Javanese artist with communist leanings and his bourgeois Eurasian love. Sudjojono, 16 years older than her, was from a family of migrant plantation workers in North Sumatra who rose to become a legislator from the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI) and a member of its powerful cultural organization Lekra.

The favored subject of his early paintings was the struggle of the wong cilik, from rickshaw drivers to farmers, and the Independence War in the late 1940s.

She was born Rosalina Wilhelmina Poppeck, the daughter of a German policeman father and a Manado mother, in Makassar, South Sulawesi. Raised in a European-oriented environment where Dutch was spoken in the home and piano and voice lessons were de rigeur, she only started to seriously study Indonesian while in high school during the Japanese occupation in World War II.

They first met by chance in Amsterdam in 1951. Rose, paying a visit on an Indonesian couple, was ushered into the living room, where a cultural delegation from their homeland was visiting. The only empty seat was next to Sudjojono.

"All I wanted to do was ask a question of the wife and quickly go on my way, so I sat there next to him for 30 minutes and didn't say anything. He would always jokingly remind me of how I had been on that first meeting."

She later returned to Jakarta, working secretarial jobs to pay for her then husband's education in medicine at Yogyakarta's Gadjah Mada University. Rose says there were already problems in her marriage when she met Sudjojono again in Jakarta at a peace conference in 1954. Once again, she found a seat next to the artist.

Their friendship began to develop into a romantic relationship when Sudjojono temporarily relocated to the capital from Yogyakarta after his election to the legislature from the PKI in 1955.

She calls the period when they decided to marry as "black and a golden page in my life … It was a very, very difficult decision, and one we thought very hard about. Everybody said that I was crazy, especially my parents."

The personal turmoil and soul-searching of that time is shown in Sudjojono's Piano in the Midst of Ruins from 1956. A forlorn male figure surveys a desolate, chaotic landscape, with a piano, apparently representing Rose, in the distance.

"Although done in his signature Realist style, the painting is not a conventional landscape but rather a landscape of his mind. It seems that artist was deliberating what he should do next," Amir Sidharta writes in Visible Soul, the lavishly illustrated art book that accompanied Sudjojono's 2006 retrospective at the National Gallery.

Sudjojono divorced his first wife, Mia Bustam, in 1958, marrying Rose a year later.

Inevitably, their families were left fractured by the decision, and they were publicly reviled. The PKI was a stickler for upholding the sanctity of marriage; Harian Rakyat daily, the powerful party mouthpiece, published vicious caricatures of them, with Rose demonized as the husband-stealing Eurasian. His longtime friends in the art community also turned their back on him.

"They said things like, 'This is only to be expected from an Indo woman,'" Rose remembered of the media articles. "It was a terrible time, and I was a very emotional person. But Pak Djon controlled his emotions, and I learned from him. I learned about nrimo - accepting a situation - which is not easy."

For some, the emotional wounds from half a century ago are still fresh. Last year, a couple of days before the National Gallery exhibition, Mia Bustam published Sudjojono dan Aku (Sudjojono and I, Pustaka Utan Kayu). She details her life with the artist, from facing parental disapproval to marry Sudjojono to their divorce, and there are also recollections from six of her eight children of their father.

Overall, Sudjojono and Rose are presented in an unflattering light, he as an egotist who, besotted by a younger love, cavalierly abandoned his loyal, long-suffering wife. She comes across as a high-strung stepmother who, some of the children claim, mocked their Javanese heritage when they lived with her in the mid-1960s.

Rose refuses to read the book - "it would make me too emotional" - but she has heard about its contents from her children. Kompas daily, in a review of the book, gave a withering assessment of Sudjojono the man and the artist, with the reviewer postulating that the quality of his work suffered after his divorce and remarriage to Rose.

"Somewhere, I can understand what they feel about me," Rose said. "I know that I would not want to be in the same position as them. But I have two questions: Why did they wait so long to publish this, and why did they have to tarnish the reputation of their father?"

Tedjabayu, Sudjojono's oldest son and a coeditor of the book, denies his mother's work was inspired by vengeance or was intended to settle old scores.

"My mother wanted to write the story for her children. We didn't think about publishing it at first, but we were told it should be made into a book, that it was good enough to be one," he said.

"Her recollections are what I remember her first telling me as a child. But this wasn't about revenge against my father and Ibu Rose. We wanted it to show Sudjojono the man, not just the artist. It's up to the reader to decide whether his decisions were right or wrong."

Although both women may dislike the comparison, their lives share parallels; both were willing to sacrifice much to marry Sudjojono, they stood by him during hardship and were, in their own time, strong, influential presences in his life and art.

Rose acknowledges her second marriage was sometimes volatile. She favored the European way of needing to resolve an argument; he preferred the Javanese way of letting things be.

"He had such a sense of humor that in the middle of an argument he would do or say something to make me laugh, and I couldn't be angry anymore."

With three children from her first marriage and eventually three more children from her marriage to Sudjojono, money was always scarce amid the political and social upheaval of the early 1960s.

"Pak Djon couldn't exhibit after leaving Lekra and nobody would buy his paintings," she said, adding that he chose to leave the party and was not expelled for marrying her, as many maintain.

"People thought I was living the luxury life, drinking Coca-Cola every day, but it was the most difficult time in my life."

Then came the abortive coup blamed on the PKI in September 1965, followed by the witch-hunts and bloodletting of communist sympathizers. Mia was put in an internment camp; her seven youngest children were sent to Jakarta.

"Affandi (the Yogyakarta-based painter) called Pak Djon and told them Yogyakarta wasn't safe for them with the hunt for communists. He asked me what to do, and I said, 'They are your children, you have to be responsible for them'."

Their arrival brought the number of children in the household to 12 (Maya was born in 1966). When times were tough, they could rely on two faithful patrons - former prime minister and foreign minister Adam Malik and the architect Sedyatmo - to buy pieces of art to tide them over until their next financial crisis.

She also turned to Adam Malik, who, as a journalist, was involved in the establishment of the first Indonesian artists association by Sudjojono in the mid-1930s, when her husband was taken away late one night by the military for questioning. They had known, she said, that the artist was "under the microscope" for his former PKI involvement.

But he returned safely the next day, thanks to Malik's intervention.

They settled into a familiar routine in the latter years of their marriage. They would drink their morning coffee on the terrace outside his studio, discussing their children, politics and the arts. He would work in his studio or teach during the day.

He was a good, kind man, Rose said, and a partner in the marriage. "Not all artists make good fathers, because they are so caught up in their art. But he was willing to take care of the children, driving them to and from school."

Sudjojono encouraged her to pursue her singing, also ferrying her back and forth between her twice-weekly appearances on RRI state radio. When they were first married, he was peeved when the radio announcer called her "Rose Sumabrata", using the name of her first husband. He renamed her "Pandanwangi" (fragrant pandan), and it is also the name of their second daughter.

"Oh, he was the most jealous man I've known," she said, smiling. "He would drive me to RRI, and I would tell him to come back later. But he wanted to stay - he would sit in the car sketching, or talk with the satay seller, sketching all the time."

In the 20 years since his death, she has continued her singing, in churches and at public functions. But contemporary music has drowned out the melancholic sounds of seriosa, an elegant musical form that enjoyed its heyday in the 1950s and '60s.

It is more suited to an intimate setting that packing them in at SRO arenas, and many of its exponents are succumbing to age. The country's most famous seriosa singer, Prawanengrum Katamsi, died in September 2006.

"I am kind of like the last of the Mohicans," Rose joked.

She devotes most of her time to preserving and protecting Sudjojono's legacy. She wants to move from now crowded Pasar Minggu and establish a center where his art can be appreciated by all. Although plans have been drawn up, the funding is still an issue. And she vows not to sell his works unless there is a "dire need".