9/23/2021

BRIEF SURVEY OF
PHILIPPINE ART
Alice G. Guillermo

THE EARLIEST ARTS in the Philippines had

their origins in indigenous myths and rituals
invoking the favor of the gods on the human
project of survival and continuance.
• Pottery, textile weaving, woodcarving and
metalwork, with their own aesthetic norms and
conventions, count among the earliest artistic
expressions, along with the more integral forms
of domestic architecture and shipbuilding.

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• These belong to the cultural traditions that the

Philippines shares with other South-East Asian
countries that long practised rice agriculture and
maritime commerce.
• Indigenous woodcarving includes freestanding
ancestral figures and rice deities that are endemic
to the islands of the region. It was also applied
to the ornamentation of houses, boats and
various agricultural and domestic tools.

This standing male figure representing a rice deity (bulul)

from the Ifugao people of northern Luzon Island in the
Philippines is an outstanding and highly important
expression of the foremost tradition of anthropomorphic
sculpture in the northern Philippines.
More on the bulul here:
https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/6263
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The earliest example of ikat

weave was excavated in
Romblon in the central
Philippines.

• Many of these traditions survive to the present

despite centuries of colonial suppression and
neglect.
• In the 16th century, Spanish colonization sought
to replace the indigenous culture with one in the
image and likeness of the West.
• In art, this was marked by the introduction of
the classical paradigm in figuration with the
schema of linear perspective on a two
dimensional surface.

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• Church/ State became the sole patrons of the

arts,
o exclusively religious in the form of altarpieces and prayer
book engravings
o under the strict supervision of the friars who ensured
correct iconography and provided European models.

• Did not result into a unitary colonial culture, but

one that operated on several levels:
o first level, the dominant colonial culture of the Church and
State, marked by formality and orthodoxy as in ecclesiastical
art;

o First level, the dominant colonial culture of the

Church and State, marked by formality and
orthodoxy as in ecclesiastical art;
o Second, a unique cultural fusion of folk indigenous
and Christian elements, as in public fiesta art
produced by Christianized lowland groups
o Third, the suppressed indigenous culture
continued by groups which resisted assimilation
into the colonial system.

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• With the opening of Philippine ports to

world trade in the mid-19th century and the
inauguration of the Suez Canal, economic
change came with cash-crop agriculture.
• By royal fiat, art was secularized, A new elite
class, the ilustrados, emerged and assumed the
role of art patrons, opening secular
perspectives in art.

The ilustrados commissioned portraits that

celebrated their social ascendance. These
portraits, mostly of women, were executed in
a style called ‘miniaturismo’, derived from the
limner’s art which paid meticulous attention to
details of costume and accessories indicative
of their wealth and status.

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Sangley (Intsik, Sangley Mestizo, Mestisong

Sangley, Mestizo de Sangley or Chinese mestizo;
plural: Sangleys or Sangleyes) is an archaic term
used in the Philippines beginning in the Spanish
Colonial Period to describe and classify a person
of pure Chinese ancestry. The Spanish used the
term mestizo de sangley to refer to a person of
mixed Chinese and indigenous/Indio (Filipino)
ancestry (the latter were referred to as Indio).
The Chinese immigrants and their descendants
played important roles in the Philippines,
contributing to trade, culture and politics.
More here:
https://www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbid=1790502
014299370&id=656729927676590&substory_index=0
Mestiza de Sangley, c1875
Digitally Colorized by Ed S. Sison
from Kinulayang Kasaysayan
Original photograph by Francisco Van Camp

In the first quarter of the 19th century, Damian Domingo — well

known for his watercolour albums of tipos del pais, country types
representing the entire range of the social hierarchy dressed in the
typical costumes of their occupation and social class — opened his
Binondo studio as the first art school, the Academia de Dibujo y
Pintura.
After Domingo’s death, the school was resumed under the
supervision of the Sociedad Economica de Amigos del Pais, which
brought in art professors from Spain.
It was through this venue
that the European
classical academy
formally exercised
its influence.

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Juan Luna won the first gold medal at the Madrid Exposition of 1884
for Spoliarium, a large-scale work in the style of 19th-century salon
painting, its subject drawn from classical antiquity, particularly
Imperial Rome and its persecution of colonized peoples.

Félix Resurrección Hidalgo

The painting was a silver medalist (ninth silver medal award

among forty-five) during the 1884 Exposicion General de Las Virgenes
Bellas Artes in Madrid, Spain, also known as the Madrid Cristianas Expuestas
Exposition. According to Raquel A.G. Reyes, Hidalgo's winning al Populacho or The
the silver medal for the painting was a landmark achievement
that proved the ability of Filipinos to match the work
Christian Virgins
of Spaniards and laid claim to Filipino participation Exposed to the
in European culture. Populace (1884)

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• The Filipino group of Propagandists in Spain, who

campaigned for reforms within the colonial system,
fully exploited this event to point out that Filipinos
could be integrated into the ‘mainstream’ Western
culture and that the inferior status of ‘colony’ could
be upgraded to ‘province’.
• The clamor for reform fell on deaf ears which led to
the rise of the Katipunan led by Andres Bonifacio,
launching an armed struggle for independence.

• The Philippine Revolution was foiled by the

United States in the 1898 Treaty of Paris, in
which Spain unilaterally ceded the Philippines
to the new colonial power.
• American colonial government defined its
priorities in education and value formation
according to the ‘American way of life’.

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• The public school system created a demand

for illustrations for textbooks and other
publications.
• With the New corporations set up in the
Philippines, a need for advertising and
commercial design arose, to which the School
of Fine Arts responded by integrating
commercial art courses into the curriculum.

• A shift in art patronage again took place, this time

with American officials, merchants and tourists as the
patrons.
• Landscapes, genre and still lifes were greatly favored
by the American patrons, who sought ‘exotic’, tropical
scenes of their new colony.
• In portraiture, often commissioned by public officials,
the detailed miniaturist style gave way to academic
portraiture that strove to endow the subject with the
appearance of benevolent authority.

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• Fernando Amorsolo and his colleagues in the

School of Fine Arts, a unit of the University
of the Philippines, catered to the new
patronage.
• Fernando Amorsolo enhanced the rural
scenery with the golden tones of harvest and
idealised the peasant folk into stalwart youths
and eversmiling maidens.

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• The Amorsolo School based in the School of

Fine Arts assumed the role of local academy,
dominating the art scene for decades. In
sculpture, Amorsolo’s counterpart was
Guillermo Tolentino, trained in the classical
academy in Rome, whose major work was the
Bonifacio Monument.

• The Amorsolo School showed its excellent

draftsmanship skills in numerous
illustrations, so much so that the 1930s were
known as the Golden Age of Illustration.
• Editorial cartoons drawn by Jorge Pineda
and Jose V. Pereira made their mark with
their witty, trenchant tirades in political
commentary.

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• The academic complacency of the Amorsolo School was jolted by

the challenge of modernism raised by Victorio Edades’ exhibit at
the Philippine Columbian Club in 1928 on his return from a
scholarship in the United States.
• Edades counterpoised the modernist value of expressiveness,
which made room for the terrible and disquieting.
• He also stressed the importance of a heightened sense of formal
design.
• Discarding the traditional notion of art as mimesis, modernism
brought to the fore the concept of painting as an artistic and
ideological construct.
• It was also Edades who took up the theme of national identity in
art.

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• Edades formed a nucleus with Carlos Francisco and

Galo B. Ocampo, the pioneering triumvirate of
modern art in the country.
• In time, they expanded into the Thirteen Moderns,
which included Diosdado Lorenzo, Vicente Manansala,
Cesar Legaspi, Anita Magsaysay-Ho and Hernando R.
Ocampo, among others.
• With the new modernist idioms, a corresponding
development was the shift from rural to urban subjects
with the expansion of genre themes.

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• These changes, however, were interrupted by World

War II and the Japanese occupation of the Philippines
in 1941 which slowed the movement of change in the
arts.
• The first art institutions that paved the way to a
• broad support system for the arts were founded in the
early post-war years. These were the Art Association
of the Philippines (AAP), founded by Purita Kalaw-
Ledesma, and the Philippine Art Gallery (PAG),
founded by Lydia Villanueva Arguilla in 1951.

• Five years after the granting of formal

independence from the United States in 1946, the
shadow of the war still fell on the paintings of
the 1950s.
• The debate between ‘proletarian art’ and ‘art for
art’s sake’ in literature and the visual arts, which
had earlier been triggered by the Depression in
the United States, also had its counterpart in the
Philippines.

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• In 1955, the decades-long struggle between the conservatives

and the modernists was resolved in the latter’s favour at the
AAP Annual Painting Competition. From then on, with the help
of writers, collectors and gallery owners sympathetic to their
cause, the modernists enjoyed the wide support and recognition
of the art public.
• Even in the early 1950s1950s, when the conservatives were the
dominant force, the avantgarde had already announced its
appearance in David Cortez Medalla, poet turned kinetic and
performance artist.
• His other works showed affinities with art brut in its radical
anti-classicism, its uninhibited figurative style and aggressive
textures.

David Medalla A Stitch in Time 1997

David Medalla with a Cloud Canyons work at Cornwall

Gardens, London, 1964

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In the 1960s, Carlos Francisco, one of the

pioneering modernists, produced paintings
and murals inspired by indigenous
aesthetics of line, form and color.

The same period also saw the maturation of

Legaspi’s neo-realist style in paintings
inspired by rock formations in the theme of
the interplay of nature and organic form,
although this would be brought to fullest
expression in his Jeepney Series two decades Workers
later. Signed and dated 74
Oil on acrylic primed chanson paper mounted on wood

Cockfight
Manansala’s style did not remain Woodcut
within classical cubism, but he instead
used it as a structuring rather than
fragmenting device and brought out
effects of transparency in his genres
and still lifes.

Fish Vendors, 162/226

Serigraph

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Elysium “Untitled,” 1960

signed and dated ‘Joya 1960’ (lower left) oil on canvas
oil on canvas laid on board
In the late 1950s, abstract art came out strongly in the works of Jose Joya and Constancio
Bernardo. Joya, fresh from studies in the United States, caused a stir with his large abstract
expressionist works impelled by a strong kinetic energy. Later, he moved to a more harmonious
idiom in acrylic collages with rice paper that played on transparent and
overlapping forms in space.

Bernardo belonged to another

school in his geometric
abstraction, reflecting the influence
of Albers and Mondrian.

Wildflower Series II
(1977)
4 pieces as set up side-
by-side at the Ayala
Museum

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Also at this time, Hernando R. Ocampo,

who began as a figurative painter, was
developing his own personal style of
abstraction based on interlocking shapes
of varied colors and textures.

Playmates, 1958
oil on canvas

55-G The Wall

signed and dated 1955 (lower right)
oil on canvas

In sculpture, the modernist challenge was

posed by Napoleon Abueva, a former student
of Guillermo Tolentino. Except for a few
conservative sculptors, Abueva was alone in
the field for about a decade. Highly versatile,
he has worked in a wide range of sculptural
media and techniques and in a variety of
approaches, often in a witty and playful vein.

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• Abueva was eventually joined by younger

modernists.
• Lamberto Hechanova
• Abdulmari Imao
• Virginia Ty-Navarro
• Eduardo Castrillo
• Solomon Saprid
• Ramon Orlina
• Imelda Pilapil

• The 1960s were halcyon years for modern art in

the Philippines.
• These were also years of social and political
ferment. For one, the period saw a rise in
nationalist consciousness which reassessed the
relationship of the Philippines with the United
States. At the same time, there was a movement
towards democratisation in art, marked by
greater freedom of popular expression and a
sensitivity to the interests of the people.

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Ang Tao, diptych

1972
acrylic on paper

Benedicto Cabrera,
printmaker and painter,
drew from antique
photographs, which he
combined with
experimental devices for
expanding the semantic
potential of the work.
Brown Brothers’ Burden
1972
acrylic on paper

Table with Fish, 1960

Oil on plywood

Ang Kiukok crystallised in vivid, cubistic

images the terror and desperation of the
times.

Crucifixed, 1977
Oil on canvas

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Jaime De Guzman painted powerful

historical and expressionist murals, but
later sought the mystery and spiritual
power of indigenous faiths.

Onib Olmedo drew from the nightmarish figures

of the lower depths.

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Danilo Dalena, acclaimed for his

political cartoons, painted large
bustling crowds of people in quest of
instant luck or miracles.

Asong Simbahan (Church Dog)

1984
Oil on canvas
"Naninilip"
signed and dated 2000 (lower right)
oil on canvas

• The decade of the 1970s was characterized by a diversity of styles

and themes. The social realists made their appearance in response
to martial law in 1972. Art of socio-political significance,as in the
work of the first-generation social realists Baens Santos, Edgar
Fernandez, Antipas Delotavo and Renato Habulan, remains an
important trend among younger groups.
• It was also they who initiated art work in popular forms, such as
comics, posters, street murals and editorial cartoons.
• Related to social realism was the historical theme mingled with
folk imagery, strikingly reconfigured in the work of Brenda
Fajardo and Ofelia Gelvezon-Tequi. Younger artists have searched
for innovative approaches in experimental media to social themes,
such as poverty and militarization.

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• Traditional art communities thrive in a number of towns of the Rizal and

Laguna provinces around Laguna de Bay.
• Regional genre painters such as Jose Blanco, Manuel Baldemor and Tam
Austria dwell on rural life, folk legends and traditions.
• The genre tradition, folk urban, continuing from the post-war paintings
of Manansala, is furthered in their own styles by artists such as Mario
Parial, Angelito Antonio and Antonio Austria. But it is also notable that a
number of fine-arts trained young artists from the town of Angono —
known for its genre tradition — have signaled the desire to break away
from the earlier mould and explore new subjects and approaches.
• In the 1980s, a growing interest in the artistic expressions of the different
cultural communities, as well as greater awareness of environmental
issues, were factors in the strong trend in the use of indigenous or
vernacular materials.

• The trend first appeared with the discovery of the virtues of

handmade paper for printmaking, and hassince resulted in a keener
sensitivity to the semantic properties of the indigenous media.
• Much recent art, both two- and three-dimensional, has made use of
materials such as bamboo, plaited rattan panels, hardwoods,
coconut bark and husk, burlap, shells, forest vines, driftwood and
seeds. With artistic insight, these materials have been integrated
into paintings or fashioned into tapestries and installations.
• Foremost among artists using indigenous materials are Paz Abad
Santos, Junyee, Santiago Bose, Roberto Villanueva, Roberto Feleo
and Imelda Cajipe-Endaya.
• Sculpture has also shown significant advances in the past decade
such as the works of Agnes Arellano, Julie Lluch, Duddley Diaz,
Gabriel Barredo, Arnel Borja and Lirio Salvador.

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Julie Lluch

Agnes Arellano

Duddley Diaz

• Meanwhile, painting in the hands of young artists crosses over to the

larger category of two-dimensional form. As such, the works open out to
a whole range of modifications, experimentations, even subversions of the
original oil-on-canvas painting tradition, with much present work done in
mixed media. Among the interventionist strategies are the incorporation
of various materials, panelled sections, appropriation and modification of
photographs, frottages, textural devices, computer-generated images and
elements, as well as the innovative management of pictorial space.
• Notable for this are the works of John Frank Sabado, Leonardo
Aguinaldo, Wire Tuazon, and Nona Garcia.
• Artists who continue to work in oil on canvasin their own distinctive
styles are Emmanuel Garibay, Elmer Borlongan, Federico and Grace
Sievert, Ronald Ventura and the Bacolod artists, Nunelucio Alvarado and
Charlie Co, among others.

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• While much important painting and sculpture continues to be done in the

country, installation art is shaping itself into a potent form, developing
from earlier hermetic constructs to striking multimedia expressions.
• Installation art, which is premised on the interplay of signifying elements
and structures within a defined space, has recently examined the concepts
of space, time and process, breaking down the parameters of the pictorial
field and the sculptural mass to open up new semantic possibilities. These
often include performative interactivity between the artist, viewer and
public and the work itself.
• From ecological themes, recent installations have shifted to themes of
identity and human interaction. Many installations and mixed-media
works have a central aspect of discursiveness in which words are called
into play to foreground the conceptual values of the work.

• The movements of migration that are so much a part of our time

have resulted in an art of social and cultural exchange with the
interaction of different communities in the region and in the world
as a whole.
• This is the general theme of the works of Imelda Cajipe-Endaya,
Alwin Reamillo, and Juan and Isabel Aquilizan.
• Another area of development comes from digital imaging with the
use of computer technology, exploiting the interface between
painting/sculpture and computer-generated images and drawing
out all possibilities, as in the recent work of Jose Tence Ruiz.
• Likewise, current is the strong trend in video art which seeks
enhanced levels of audiovisual experience in a vital interplay with
installations and literary-discursive forms.

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• Providing the infrastructure of art, galleries and museums have, on the whole,
welcomed the new developments apart from space constraints and have
mounted installation shows that depart from the conventional formats.
 The Cultural Center of the Philippines
 The Finale Art File
 West Gallery
 The Ayala Museum
 Pinto Gallery
 Kulay Diwa
 Green Papaya
 Hiraya Gallery
 The Ateneo Art Gallery
 The Lopez Museum
 National Museum
 Museum of the Filipino People
 Metropolitan Museum of Manila
 GSIS Museum/

• From the initial flourishing of modernism in the post-war years,

Philippine art from the 1990s to the present has shown an increasing
momentum in creative activity and production.
• It is possible to say that the last decade of the 20th century and the
transition to the present has been particularly dynamic in terms of new
concepts and values.
• These years have manifested a renewed energy in art-making with the
vast new resources that the artists have accessed and explored.
• Art competitions have provided encouragement and raised artistic
standards.
• The opening of regional and international fora such as biennials and
triennials hosted by large cities, and the productive exchange generated
by symposia bringing together artists and writers from all parts of the
world, have contributed to the rich art production that we enjoy today.

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