By a late invitation, I was able to attend the vernissage of ‘The Patrimony of All’, the exhibit of Lunas, Hidalgos, Amorsolos, and Arellanos at the main performance hall of UPV’s Museum of Art and Cultural Heritage last November 2024. While truly yours was engrossed in conversation with impresario Pablo Tariman and historian Ambeth Ocampo, I was admittedly inattentive to the frames before me. That afternoon, the paintings were but blobs and blurs of color and scenery drowned in the reverie and repartee of the moment.
Consequently, I was not ‘moved’ to write about the artworks on display during that time. Perhaps the hesitation stemmed out of a sense of aesthetic reverence, when one beholds the works of the masters and there is that coming to terms with the names and images that were usually only textbook material. Or perhaps, the sheer amount of schoolwork interfered with the enchantments of the Muse. Much like how we were thought to consider these works to be ‘nationally significant’, these left truly yours in a reflective state that eventually brought me back (several times) to the gallery to peruse the paintings and to arrive to this rambling commentary.
Juan Luna and Félix Resurrección Hidalgo: the two giants of Philippine art whom every middle school student stumbles upon his Araling Panlipunan textbook, probably through diminutive and badly rendered monochrome images of the Spoliarium or the Las Virgenes Cristianas. To appreciate the vast proportions of their artworks, one has to fly to Manila to view their paintings. Now, who would have thought their artworks would go as far south as Iloilo City?
Seen up close, Luna’s paintings have the ability to elevate the most mundane of subjects into existential studies of the human form. The sidewalk café, the bohemian bistro, the arbor and orchard, the flowered foyer, and the intimate boudoir were his aesthetic realm and the common folk who inhabit these were his subjects. Corseted in his unconforming style of classical portraiture, little of the impressionist made an impression on him. With nothing akin to the theatrical dimensions of his bigger canvases, Luna’s canvases were montages of the lazy ordinariness of his contemporary expat petit bourgeois.
But we cannot blame him for this. Luna was part and parcel of the company that he kept. For one who frequented the avenues and shops of Madrid and Paris with other Filipino expatriates of the time, his canvases served as camera obscura to this la vie boheme. A fruit-picker’s frozen pose atop a ladder. The post-coital laze of a woman (his wife?) between the sheets. The cozy salon bedecked with crimson roses and the hushed echo of an unheard conversation. For Luna, it is in the ordinary where lies the timeless.
Conversely, Hidalgo tends to distance himself from this mundanity. Nothing of the austere must be captured on his canvases: everything must be overly dramatic – or at least, dramatized. His was the vibrance of colors, the intensity of hues and shades, the dramatic vigor of figures – Hidalgo is the classicist breathing his last gasp of influence in a time of modern turns and shifts. The dead from the Chinese pirates’ battle must sprawl lifeless in grotesque postures. The Spanish governor’s assassination must be operatic in dimension and range, banners a-flutter and actors costumed and arranged by the bannisters of a grand staircase. Even the lachrymose depiction of the dead crossing the Stygian waters is replete with life-like vigor.
A dramatic requiem on canvas, La Barca de Aqueronte depicts the morbid narrative of an afterlife inundated by insatiable gods and monsters. Wrapped in a haze of a tenebrous mist, naked figures spill over the stern of a shallow craft buffeted by Stygian waves; at the prow stands the somber figure of Charon, ferryman of the dead, holding what seems to be a narrow oar or a long-handled scythe. Either suggests the dual understandings of death among the ancients: a passing over to the other realm while at the same time, a shearing of the thread of life. There is something Wagnerian in its staging and its thanatotic dualism: the act of death elevated into theatrical spectacle.
But what exactly in these artworks that can speak for the Filipino as we know him today? One might go as far to say that Hidalgo’s art is the Filipino’s commentary about his own history seen through Western eyes. He had no qualms about incorporating classical mythology onto the nation’s story, even to the point of allegorizing chummy relations between Americans and Filipinos at the wake of the Filipino-American War. Here is history mythologized by visual narrative – and the allegory is not lost to our modern sensibilities. Cringe as we might, we can easily drown in the vibrance and verve, but we sensibly look forward to rising from its depths.
Fernando Amorsolo and Juan Arellano followed on the wake of Luna and Hidalgo’s demure Sturm und Drang. Far from their predecessors’ visual theatrics, the generation of artists who followed the illustrados looked to back to nature and the bucolic mannerisms that would continue in the Philippine art scene to this day.
Amorsolo is the ultimate Filipino pastoralist. No one else could capture idyllic landscapes of farm and field or coastal spectacles of shore and sea than the soft dabs of paint by our first National Artist. Patronizing as that sounds, he truly loved the rurality of the country: its customs, festivals, and people. While he left no names for his artworks – at least for those displayed in the gallery – this state of obscurity merely invites the viewer to find (or to lose?) himself in the scenery, for whatever pleasure or philosophy he or she can glean from what is seen.
But there lies the rub. Amorsolo’s portrayal of the gay life of field and forest, of harvest and herds seems to be an obnoxious echo of what Prof. Renato Constantino remarks in The Miseducation of the Filipino: the artist idealized the unrealities of the Filipino farmer. His figures never break a sweat even while planting or harvesting palay under the sweltering heat of the sun. His peasants are happy folk with smile and song, guitar for music and bamboo poles for dancing. His festivals are frenetic vignettes replete with color and charisma. His barrio maidens are bronzed, sultry figures posed in various states of chores or undress.
No poverty, no malnutrition, no agrarian inequalities, no oppressive hardships. Nothing of the sordid and the vulgar in Amorsolo’s canvases. On the contrary, happy is the life at farm and field: here is the Filipino pastoralist as rural propagandist.
Arellano is obscurer and more sedate in comparison. The most accessible piece of his work that we can palpably experience would be the architecture of the university’s museum. Designed originally as the City Hall and embellished with gigantic allegorical figures of sculptor Francesco Monti, the structure eventually became the main building of the university and in the past years, it was refurbished and transformed into the institution’s museum, a fitting shrine for the revered work of our artists classical and contemporary.
And now, Arellano’s artworks have come to stay in the house he built – at least, for a few months. Like Amorsolo, his works capture local scenes of mountains and hills set on cloud-filled skies. A rather austere Pieta constitutes the dramatic participant among his displays. While the impressionist inclination of the artist is perceivable in these, one is still more impressed with the building that housed the artworks. Arellano is architect extraordinaire foremost, and his canvas and brush play second viol: one is reminded of Michelangelo’s incessant spats with the Pope on the matter of the inadequacies of the architect as painter.
So what is indeed shared in this patrimony? Would it be the Westernizing of Filipino themes and subjects? Would it reside on viewing rustic nipa huts, lumbering carabaos, and chic illustrados through rose-colored lenses of forced perspective, chiaroscuro, mise en scène, portraiture, and allegory? Would it be the suggestion of past glory days framed through art – if indeed these frames are meant to romanticize the narratives of our struggles and sorrows? And if we partake of it, what shall we take out of it?
In his Culture and History, National Artist Nick Joaquin attempts to elucidate on the pivotal question of what constitutes the Filipino. His essay into national identity establishes the intractable links of our culture to Western influences. “Before 1521 we could have been anything and everything not Filipino; after 1565 we can be nothing but Filipino,” Joaquin writes and proceeds to corroborate this with historical, linguistic, gastronomic, and aesthetic arguments. He mentions the three – Luna, Hidalgo, and Amorsolo – with the frame of mind that painting is the most ‘foreign’ among our art forms, yet we have also taken great strides and bounds with the works of these masters.
Far be it for this writer to decry the Western influences in Philippine art, the masterpieces of our artistes reveal and affirm Filipino capabilities and adaptabilities in the artworld. Émigré or arcadian, genius knows no country – this is our patrimony. Rizal, as one who shared his times with some of them, understood that profoundly and here in his contemporaries’ artworks can we find the visual imprimatur of his statement.
The exhibit closes in a few days. Catch that glimpse of this shared patrimony before only the memory of this lingers.
