Lot description
PROPERTY FORMERLY FROM THE BENGUET CORPORATION COLLECTION In the Farm / Digging Camotes / Family signed and dated 1944 (lower right) oil on board 18" x 24" (46 cm x 61 cm) PROVENANCE Benguet Corporation Acquired from the above by the present owner LITERATURE Ocampo, Galo B. Anita Magsaysay: A Liberated Artist. Manila: United States Information Library and Division of Cultural Relations, Commonwealth Government of the Philippines, 1946. Published to accompany Anita's debut solo exhibition held at the USIS in early 1946. Mentioned on page 8 in Anita's list of paintings included in the show. Guillermo, Alice, Purita Kalaw-Ledesma, and Anita Magsaysay-Ho. Anita Magsaysay-Ho: A Retrospective. Manila: A. Magsaysay, Inc., 1988. Published on the occasion of the exhibition Anita Magsaysay-Ho: A Retrospective at The Metropolitan Museum of Manila. Full-color illustration and painting description on page 31. Magsaysay-Ho, Anita and Alfredo R. Roces. Anita Magsaysay-Ho: In Praise of Women. Pasig: The Crucible Workshop, 2005. Full-color illustration and painting description on page 139. EXHIBITED United States Information Library, Paintings of Anita Magsaysay, Plaza Cervantes, Manila, 23 February - 10 March 1946 The Metropolitan Museum of Manila, Anita Magsaysay-Ho: A Retrospective, Manila, 15 December 1988 - 15 January 1989 A rare memento of Anita’s wartime experiences showcased in her first solo show A rare wartime painting by Anita Magsaysay-Ho, In the Farm captures both an idyllic environment removed from the war's ground zero and a hopeful longing for an eventual return to peacetime. The work depicts a family in a vast field, with the mother about to carry a basketful of kamoteng kahoy (cassava) gathered by her daughter, a most crucial source of sustenance during World War II, when food was scarce, and the greater populace was suffering from hunger. The father is seen packing up his pick and shovel, as they are about to go home and endure seemingly countless days and nights surviving and remaining hopeful in those uncertain times. The work, alternatively titled Digging Camotes, was among the highlights of Anita's debut solo exhibition, mounted at the United States Information Library at Plaza Cervantes, Binondo, in early 1946, immediately after the war. Painter Galo Ocampo notes in the exhibition catalog that Anita's show was "the first of a series that the Commonwealth Government intends to sponsor from time to time…[in] hopes to rediscover the cultural wealth of the country and to develop its artistic potentialities for the benefit of the living and as a tribute to those who fought and died to preserve our way of life." "The choice of Miss Magsaysay to begin a series of art exhibits is doubly significant. She is young. She is young. As a girl of promising talent, she was tenderly bred in the Genteel Tradition." The exhibition, which featured 47 paintings (39 oils and 8 watercolors), was the talk of the town, generating buzz and lively conversations amid the ruins of the once glorious capital. Approximately 2,000 individuals viewed the paintings, "of which fully one half were purchased—by all odds, one of the most successful art exhibitions ever put on in this country," as noted by Ismael Villanueva "I.V." Mallari, one of the early prolific writers and art critics of the country, in his article "The Philippines Through Undimmed Eyes," published in the periodical The Philippine-American. Digging Camotes (In the Farm) was one of the most expensive paintings in the exhibition, priced at 150 pesos, a substantial sum at the time. Ocampo lauded Anita's works as displaying "a remarkable degree of artistic abandon born of confidence and freedom. Her strokes are firm and purposeful. She has grasped the importance of design, of line, space, and color, and of richness in texture." Ocampo further noted that "although steeped in the traditions of the old school, Miss Magsaysay was able to shake off the fetters of academic art and to achieve individual freedom of expression." He concluded his praises for Anita by christening her as "an exceptionally gifted artist who will go on hurdling the obstacles that stand on the way." Montalban’s temporary utopia In the Farm is a post-impressionistic work painted by Anita in Montalban, Rizal, where her family escaped as the war reached its violent climax. Montalban bore witness to Anita and her family's great escape from the impending bloodshed and battle for the capital city's liberation. The Magsaysays hurriedly left their Pasay home on Villaruel Street, as many people started evacuating the city upon hearing of the news "that the Americans were coming back just as MacArthur had promised." Anita wrote in her memoirs: "My father's good friend, Mr. Cueto, invited us to use the second floor of his house in Montalban. Our family, along with Mama's youngest brother, Tio Ramon Corpus, and family, moved there. At this time, the Japanese Army was starting to suffer from a scarcity of food. They commandeered trucks carrying fruits and vegetables. We would hide our chickens in the bathroom whenever Japanese soldiers were in town." "We met many, many, many friends in Montalban," Anita continued. "Lourdes Reyes Montinola and her sister and relatives were there. Some of my friends wanted to learn how to draw, so I gave lessons in drawing, providing them with baskets and fruits to copy. Some of them actually drew well. During the war years, we wore wooden clogs (bakya), but mind you, our wooden shoes were special-carved and painted with rural scenes of nipa huts and coconut trees." Life in Montalban was somewhat subdued, despite the ubiquitous scenarios of people digging camotes as an alternative staple food in lieu of rice, which had seen critical levels of shortage during the war as production was disrupted and heavily militarized. While in Montalban, Anita found time to paint, amidst the lush fields, the scent of crisp country air, the rhythmic moos of the grazing livestock, the staccato cluckings of the poultry, and the towering natural corridors that are the Sierra Madre mountains, with Mount Irid, Rizal's highest peak, soaring majestically above them all. Painter-critic Alfredo Roces recalled this critical juncture in Anita's life and career in his monograph on the artist. "The war years did not prevent Anta from painting," Roces wrote. "Her father provided her with thin, smooth, white boards of wood about four inches square, on which she painted portraits. She gave art lessons to friends. When the family evacuated [from] Manila to Montalban, she managed to paint palette-knife landscapes." Anita's life in Montalban was a great contrast from their life in the city. "We hardly stepped out of the house [in Pasay] as there were many Japanese sentries stationed in the streets," Anita wrote. "Luckily, we had a brave cook who went to the market everyday for fresh food." Anita also recalled that her cousin, Benjamin Rodriguez, survived the infamous Bataan Death March. In December 1941, when news of the Japanese bombing of Clark and Nielson fields was already spreading like wildfire in the streets of Manila, Anita and her sister, Emma, found themselves scrambling to buy first aid kits at Botica Boie in Escolta. There, Anita witnessed people seemingly stripped of their senses and sanity, as stores were being looted and grocery stocks hoarded. On the other side of the coin, there is a palpable tension in the work resulting from Anita's use of a palette knife, which gives the painting a dynamic texture and strong contrasts between color, form, and space. Around the same time Anita painted In the Farm, she penned a poignant poem as a cathartic release from the injustice of war. "Is it wrong to dream? / To build my castles in the air, / Today when everything is dim / And fate seems so unfair?..." "...To glorify my country's grandeur, / Her mountains and hills / The valleys rich with harvest / Her rivers and her hills. / To portray her children's laughter, / The wisdom of the old at home, / And her brave youth that struggle, / Upon this earth we call our own!" Notice that in this painting, Anita's use of the palette knife induces tension and anxiety. Through the thick impastos that produce a highly textured composition, Anita speaks of her aches and longing for a liberated nation, where she could exalt the glories of the motherland and articulate and be uplifted by the stories of resilience and freedom. For Anita, there is no freeing the strains of one's soul if the motherland is not emancipated from the aggravations of a ruthless hegemony—a freedom that speaks for all. Furthermore, the mother is noticeably positioned in the center. Her dress strikingly evokes the Philippine flag; she is the personification of "Inang Bayan," the motherland. As the painting's protagonist, she anchors the other figures, who are bowed down in oppression, except the young boy, who looks and points towards the horizon, an allegory for the "brave youth that struggle": the bright promise of the future, the defenders and hope of the homeland. He clings to his mother’s skirt, an interesting device Anita underscores to make known her stand: that her motherland belongs only to her countrymen, which she symbolically touches on in her poem. In this work are vestiges of Paul Cezanne, whom Anita counted as an early influence, particularly during her studies at the School of Design co-founded by the modernist patriarch Victorio Edades, who also admired the PostImpressionist luminary. The highly textured space resulting from Anita's use of the palette knife evokes a Cezanne key principle: structure over impression, permanent over the fleeting. Anita's palette knife composition, with its dynamic palpability and tactility, captures a moment frozen in time, a lasting snapshot of her contradicting temperaments during the most tempestuous and apprehensive of times; a longing for peace in the midst of war, a transient countryside relief she yearned to last in perpetuity. Anita and her family would eventually return to their Pasay home when food in Montalban grew more expensive, a scenario they would also witness back in the city. She recalled that their cook “had to bring a bayong of money just to buy chicken and pork from the market. Money had become useless, its value going down every passing day.” When the Battle of Manila was ringing its death knell, Anita and her family carefully escaped with some of their valuable belongings through mined roads towards the house of Dr. Veloso, a family friend. That same night, Anita witnessed the sky ablaze with fire and smoke from the Japanese burning of houses and buildings. They would find out the next morning their house and property were fortunately spared from the horrors that happened in the dead of night. In the Farm at Anita's First Retrospective In the Farm would be showcased in Anita's first retrospective exhibition, held at the Metropolitan Museum of Manila from December 1988 to January 1989. Poetically titled Isang Pag-Alaala, it was Anita's first show in 10 years and, most notably, the Philippines' first large-scale, full retrospective exhibition, capturing in more than 100 works her four prolific decades as the country's foremost Filipina painter. During this time, Anita and her family had been living in Hong Kong, where she spent 17 years of her life. Anita's retrospective, which also marked her Philippine homecoming, was one of the year's—and the decade's— most important and anticipated shows, with all of the country's major newspapers covering it almost daily. The late Maurice Arcache, who legendarily captured the glitz, glam, and gossip of Manila's high society in his column "My Lips Are Sealed…Sometimes," dubbed Anita's show as the "Retrospective of the Decade," writing in his article that the exhibition caused probably one of Manila's most iconic bumper-to-bumpers, completely shutting off the stretch of Roxas Boulevard and nearby streets. "The cocktails on opening night was so crowded that many of Manila's toppity-top visibles and rare-visible personalities failed to see Anita's magnifique and formidable works of art, and had to dash back the following day to really scrutinize the paints," Arcache wrote. "It was the event of the season as some 500 guests from all over the country trooped to the museum. At one point, the boring traffic jam outside stretched for a quarter of a mile, and many anxious guests abandoned their cars just to get inside." Among the VVIPs of the opening cocktails were Manila's who's who: Sen. Leticia Shahani, Asia's King of Fashion Pitoy Moreno, Purita Kalaw-Ledesma, collector and connoisseur Dr. Teyet Pascual, critic Eric Torres, Judy Araneta-Roxas, Nene Quimson, Maribel Ongpin, Gemma Cruz, Bambi Harper, Bessie Legarda, Federico Aguilar Alcuaz, Baby Fores, Bea Zobel, and Bing Roxas. "One thing was proven that evening. Our living legend, artist par excellence, the one-of-a-kind Anita Magsaysay-Ho, wherever she may live, will always remain a Filipina whom we can all immensely be proud of, dahlings," Arcache wrote. In the invitation for the retrospective, Anita wrote a personal dedication to the Filipina, her perpetual source of inspiration. "I dedicate this exhibition to the women of the Philippines—the source of my inspiration—their movements and gestures, their expressions of happiness and frustrations, their diligence and shortcomings, their joy of living. I know well, for after all, I am one of them." In In the Farm, the woman is the painting's protagonist. Anita renders her with a kind of dignified grace only a woman could articulate well. Going back to her Zambales roots and its women folk, to whom she was always indebted to for giving her "the depth of impressions" which she "subconsciously drew upon with so much fondness and passion" whenever she painted, the retrospective, inasmuch a celebration of her artistic legacy, was an homage to the country women of her province, whether they are working in the fields, mending nets by the seashore, or just bonding through lighthearted conversations and gossips. Even in the context of the wartime painting In the Farm, Anita puts the Filipina front and center as a consummate exemplar of honor and resilience, of constant struggles and eventual triumphs, whatever one's life's circumstances or standing may be.