Picturing Local Art History

by Raymund L. Fernandez

for Kinutil CDN / 24 August 2014

In the previous Kinutil it was explained how art history can be graphically represented with a drawing of a tree. The art history tree helps as a graphic aid for understanding Western art history but it becomes more interesting when we fit Philippine art history into this pictorial model. 

The Western art history tree is structured with the root system representing the eras from the stone age to the rise of the monolithic Roman empire. This is a time span including the ancient civilizations, Sumeria, Babylon, Messopotamia, Egypt, Greece, etc.. These stone-building civilizations work up to the monolithic Roman empire when the run of Western European history converges into a single trunk. After this point, history is described as  periods: Early Christian, Byzantine, Romanesque, Gothic, Renaissance, Baroque, and then finally Modernism. At the latter chronological point, history begins to be described as individual movements each of which is driven by a particular ideology, philosophy, and method of artistic expression.

It is useful at this point to note that the art history tree helps us, non-Western readers, read history as it is written by Westerner historians themselves. This reading simplifies history for us but we have to be mindful that the complete story is really more complex than can be entirely accounted for even by our pictorial model. Consider for instance that the Renaissance occurred in many European geographic localities at different times. These may be accounted for by further readings. Search Florentine, Northern Renaissance, etc..

The art history tree requires a different reading when we apply it to Philippine history. We had our own stone-age. But we never went through a period of building large edifices using stone. The technologies for building large edifices with stone required builders to develop for themselves an accurate method of measurement. This presumes the application of measurement and mathematics into a formal system to describe what is correct and therefore "beautiful". This formal relationship between mathematics and beauty forms the core philosophy of the "classical". This core philosophy is encompassing, covering all manner of human artistic enterprise including classical music and painting.

Because we did not go through a period of stone-building before the period of colonization it may be presumed that there was no period of Philippine classicism before we were colonized by Europeans and eventually by United States-Americans. Classicism as an idea came to us only as a consequence of colonization. Nevertheless, it was in the course of our fall into colonial rule that our history began to converge for us into a single trunk of historical development.

It was Spain who gave us our name, Philippines. This name effectively put our cultural growth from then on into a single trunk of history. Given this assertion, where then should we apply the ground line for our own history tree? And how should we date it? This ground line would have to be around the time of the 16th century when the first Spanish settlements were established here. Admittedly, this assignment of labels to our art history tree can only elicit vigorous argumentation. But it only makes the model even more fun.

And in any case, these arguments would not compare with subsequent arguments that would result from assigning the point when Modernism occurs for us. And there will be many who will question whether or not we have truly achieved a point of Modernism in our history. Modernism came to the West in the course of industrialization and the rise of representative democracies in the late 1800s. It is possible to argue that we Filipinos are still trying to get to this level of historical achievement. What with the type of ruling-class politicians we have and governance the way it is? So we might as well point out that the reading of history is never really as empirical as some would like to represent it.

But in Philippine art history, the growth of Modernist painting came around the 1950s all the way to the 1960s when a movement of Filipino Modernist painters began to assert themselves. This occurs at a period immediately after the end of World War II when the Philippines was trying to rebuild itself after the devastation of war. 

This is an arguable point and it is worthwhile to ask if local modernist art movements such as local Impressionism, Expressionism, Abstractionism, Cubism, Surrealism, etc. truly compare with their counterparts in Western art history. Because they are inherently derived from Western Modernist teachings, how then do we correctly account for them?

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