Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Filipino culture
In
, José Rizal worried that Filipinos would become “a people
without a soul”. It's a theme that has been much developed by travel writers
ever since, from Pico Iyer's description of “lush sentimentality” and Filipina
“obsession” with high-school romance and pageants in
El Filibusterismo
Video Night in
Kathmandu
, to Michael Palin observing that American interest in the country is
“unashamedly obvious” in
. Yet there is a lot more to Philippine culture
than cover bands, girlie bars and endless beauty pageants. Over the years
Filipino writers, rappers, film-makers and artists have developed distinctive
styles that incorporate elements of all the nation's disparate cultural elements.
Full Circle
Fine arts
Classical painting in the Philippines goes back to the Spanish period, but there are two
acknowledged Filipino masters:
Juan Luna
(1859-99) and
Félix Hidalgo
(1855-1913).
Both artists helped shine attention on the Philippines after submitting paintings to the
1884 Exposición General de Bellas Artes in Madrid. Luna's huge and drama-laced
Spolarium
(1884) is perhaps the most famous painting in the Philippines (on display at
the National Art Gallery; see p.66), while his equally admired
The Blood Compact
graces the Malacañang Palace. Luna spent most of his career in Europe and died in
Hong Kong, and he's best known today for painting literary and historical scenes.
Hidalgo also spent much of his career in Europe and died in Spain, creating haunting
works such
Las Virgenes Cristianas Expuestas al Populacho
(“The Christian Virgins
Exposed to the Populace”) and
Laguna Estigia
(“he Styx”).
With the end of Spanish rule and a growing sense of independence in the twentieth
century, Filipino painters were more content to develop their craft at home.
Fernando
Amorsolo
(1892-1972) studied at the University of the Philippines' School of Fine
Arts and gained prominence during the 1920s and 1930s for popularizing images of
Philippine landscapes and demure rural Filipinas; his
Rice Planting
(1922) became one
of the most popular images of the American period, and he became the first “National
Artist” in 1972. Meanwhile,
Victorio Edades
(1895-1985) introduced Modernism to
the Philippines with
The Builders
(1928), a style he'd developed in the US in direct
contrast to Amorsolo. He went on to establish the UST College of Fine Arts in the
1930s, a bastion of avant-garde art.
World War II changed the way artists saw the world: Amorsolo's pastoral scenes gave
way to the grimmer, urban images of
Vicente Manansala
(1910-1982), as
portrayed in
works like
Jeepneys
(1951). Other notable late twentieth-century painters include
José
T. Joya
(1931-95), the Filipino abstract artist, and
Fernando Zóbel de Ayala y Montojo
(1924-84), a Modernist painter who also developed his craft in the US.
he
contemporary art scene
in the Philippines is dynamic and eclectic, fed in part by
exceptionally good art schools in the capital, with popular current forms and styles
covering everything from installation art and video to realism and street art. One of the
most highly acclaimed contemporary artists is
Ronald Ventura
, whose
Grayground
Painting
fetched almost P47 million at auction in 2011, making it the most expensive
Philippine painting ever sold. Pilipinas Street Plan (
W
pilipinastreetplan.blogspot.com)
and the Juju Bag (
W
thejujubag.wordpress.com) are
art communities
that showcase
street art, gra
ti, posters, stickers and installations, while
Rocking Society through
Alternative Education
(Rock Ed;
W
rockedphilippines.org) has produced some
