The Painter as Filipino
Last year, I had the privilege to attend a lecture by Eric Torres, one of the leading art critics in the country. He talked about art and what makes it Philippine. We went through his slides showing the movements in European art that eventually led to a discussion about foremost Filipino painters particularly Juan Luna.
On our next session, we visited the National Art Gallery. It was my second time to see the Spoliarium and it got me to ask Mr. Torres about the prestige of Luna winning the top prize in Spain. A friend told me that if one would like to make it big in the world of art then one should have his work shown in Paris. I drew a sharp remark from Mr. Torres: "You be the judge! Look at this painting!"
In my later research on Juan Luna, I found an article written by Mr. Torres for a lecture in 1967 for an exhibition commemorating the 110th birth anniversary of the painter at the Lopez Memorial Museum. It described the situation of the Ilustrados at that time and dissected Luna's artistic leanings. I'm quoting some parts of this lecture. Bold text are mine for emphasis.
"In the 19th century, anybody in Europe who wanted to be somebody in the art world had to submit his works to the Salon. The Salon, which could make or break him, was annual exhibition run by an association of established artist largely connected with schools of fine arts. If he was lucky, his works passed the severe screening test and were shown to the public. These Salons were grand affairs attended by everybody—the bourgeoisie and the ruling classes, the culturati and the glamorosi—who could give the aspiring artist overnight success, instant respectability, social status, and money. If he won a prize, so much the better. He became, in time, part of the Establishment itself that dictated artistic taste. He had it made."
Imagine living in that period when little was known about us then here comes Juan Luna, making his mark in the art circles of Europe. He gained recognition as a great painter, who's also a Filipino. The article goes further in describing Luna as an artist:
"In the case of Luna, as with most Salon painters, art could not remain something that simply presented visual order and compositional balance, and end in itself, social, and even political ends. To serve such ends it must employ technical means, dynamic and rhetorical enough to excite the emotions of the spectator and inspire him into action. A style, in short, that leads itself to propaganda. The style of the Spoliarium, and other historical paintings with similar message to deliver, draw more from romanticism than from classicism, because of Luna's passionate, impetuous temperament."
His work, The Spoliarium, serves a higher purpose.
"It is the kind of painting that lends itself to the patriotic needs and on which Rizal and others projected a nationalistic symbolism; it has the kind of visual rhetoric that helped rouse the Filipino desire to do something about political oppression."
He did go to Paris and based on his works, it was said that he was hesitant to dabble with Impressionism.
Impressionism is an aesthetic that captures the essential qualities of an image, such as the shifting effects of light and atmosphere. The most common subjects of Impressionists were landscapes, scenes of bourgeois recreation, and urban slices of life. (Source: The New York Times Guide to Essential Knowledge, 2007)
It was a growing movement in Europe at that time and it has a profound effect to modern art. Think of Monet, Cézanne, Manet, Renoir.
To state it more plainly, the conventional was more like this:
The reaction was this:
What makes this painting so special is that it captures a familiar trait in our culture. It's tampuhan and it has no direct English translation. The word closest to this is "sulk" which isn't accurate. I think we have varying degrees of feeling and we communicate non-verbally. We raise our eyebrows to add emphasis to what we're saying; our lips in pointing directions; our pakikiramdam in determining if somebody has tampo and Luna was able to capture the essence of this word by this beautiful painting. You know that it's ours. You feel in it your bones upon looking at it. This is us.
