Hidalgo and Luna: Vexed Modernity (page 2 of 8) 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | Indignation and opera In any case, sharp definition is available with regard to the dtstance between the two artists and their reproduced selves. Not much distance, at first pass. On the whole, Hidalgo and Luna interpreters share a passion for accurate biographical detail, which likely accounts for the impression one gets that little has changed in a century. The Luna who wrote in a letter from Paris to Rizal, in December 1890, expressing indignation,   "[Wenceslao Retana] says that I am not known in Spain and that he has seen all my paintings, except one, and according to those who know, I do not occupy any notable place among Spanish painters, but, on the contrary, I am a painter of the fifth or sixth class! Tell me now what inanities this man says about me and what his judgment is that I should get offended. All this is written to make our countrymen understand that we are...as always of an inferior race and we are always at the tail end." appears to be the same luna that art critic Emmanuel Torres wrttes about in The Manila Bulletin—the Luna of   "...the big historical and allegorical painting, with all its romantic visual rhetoric of theatrical lighting, vigorous movement, bravura brushstrokes, and heroic stances, who was glorified by nationals like Rizal and Lopez-Jaena. Through his Salon conquests, Luna became the living proof that the Filipino was capable of the highest achievement and the living refutation against certain racist contentions of Peninsular and Colonial Spaniards that the Indio was not worth much as a human being, intellectually inutil." (bold type in the original)

There is notable consistency in even the timbre of language use in the paragraphs, including the register of righteous indignation. Torres has a more economical way with language than other critics and commentators, but Filipinos will instantly recognize the refrain. This is what Filipinos have been taught to say and think about Luna since the success of Spoliarium. There is no lack of similar examples, although the version of writer Nick Joaquin has the gravity of a Papal bull: "... [Luna's] works are a direct refutation of everything that was being said against the Indio, and a proud demonstration of what the Filipino is—or should be." ³ Joaquin also turns up that tone of indignation into operatic heights, in his introduction to the inevitable fu11-color tome:

"Was the Indio indolent? So Luna did one mighty canvas after another to prove that the Filipino was the very marvel of industry. Was the Indio said to be passive? So Luna filled his canvasses with action and more action to prove that the Filipino was dynamic. Was the Indio said to be inferior? So Luna did paintings that won prizes in Europe to prove that the Filipino could triumph over the white man on the white man's ground. Was the Indio said to be uncultured? So Luna tackled the whole world of Western culture to prove that the Filipino was erudite and cosmopolitan. Was the Indio said to be unoriginal? So Luna experimented with a hundred styles to prove that the Filipino was inventive. Was the Indio said to be capable only of the small effort? So Luna went to work on canvases as large as eight meters to prove that the Filipino was capable of the colossal endeavor. And was the Indio said to be meek and shy? Well, there was Luna facing up to kings, and having his way with queen regents, to prove that the Filipino was listo enough and noble enough to sit with princes and dukes!"4

And, in journalese, the same sentiments become bathos:

"It was a time when the Spanish king didn't seem to have eyes for the Philippines, which was crying for freedom from Spanish misrule. Luna and Hidalgo, who were among the politico intelligentsia seeking reforms, together with Rizal, Del Pilar, and Lopez Jaena, dipped their brushes into their motherland's tears to create Spoliarium and Christianas as living catalysts for change."5

A digression: opera itself may not have been incidental to this grandiloquent project of proving indio worth. That in the second half of the 19th century, Manila theaters hosted annual seasons of opera and zarzuela by French, Italian, British, and Spanish companies,⁶ and that the Manila bourgeoisie was entertained in this cosmopolitan fashion, often enough hearing the works of Verdi, Chueca, Gounod, Bellini, and Schubert (and furthermore processioned in Intramuros to remarkable choir music⁷), could very well have had something to do with a Filipino proclivity for the heightened declaration—connected or not with indigenous forms of oratory. There is certainly at least a metaphoric way in which an operatic sensibilité may be seen to form a clear line of descent from the Spoliarium—and the form of nationalism it helped inaugurate—to its most recent exegeses. One might add that Manila was after all the city where the 19th century arrived grandiloquently in the form of a painting of Fernando VII, in 1825 newly restored to his autocratic throne that was temporarily occupied by the Napoleonic court of France. The royal portrait was paraded on a garlanded float on a carriage, through Manila streets where the facades of the houses of the wealthy (including the grand Gorricho home of Luna's mother-in-law) featured elaborate swags and drapes, and the people cheered—a painting.⁸

Hidalgo and the lineage of his interpreters have been much more circumspect, but have held the artist's paintings in a no less elevated way. The Hidalgo refrain, for instance in the representative version of art historian Santiago Albano Pilar in the 1980's, is also heroically formulated: "If Luna was the country's first nationally committed, painter, Hidalgo was its first champion of a fine artistic sensibility singularly dedicated to the perfection of art."⁹ Hidalgo himself spoke of his ambition in relation to fortitude:

"Tied up to my workload...! barely have time to rest during the day; in as much as [my day is] spent between the Academia and the Museum. Were it not for the hope of becoming an artist some day, I would not have the fortitude to go on pursuing here a life of all work with no sustenance and no amusement..."10

This language is familiar today. Hidalgo's most thorough biographer, art historian and critic Alfredo Roces, offers this gist in the most recent book-length effort on this artist: "Viewing Hidalgo's delicate paisajes, there is little more one can add in appreciation, except 'amen,' to the critiques by Rizal and other subsequent ones..."¹¹ More importantly, there is a marked epic quality in descriptions that propose a structurally embedded Phllippine-ness in the content of Hidalgo's (and also Luna's) art. In Jose Rizal's words: "...Hidalgo is all light, color, harmony, feeling, limpidity, like the Philippines in her moonlight nights on her tranquil days, with her horizons that invite to meditation, and where the infinite lulls." In Rizal, a causal science even suffuses the poetic prose:

"...in Hidalgo's painting the purest sentiment throbs, ideal expression of melancholy, beauty, and weakness, victims of brute force; and it is because Hidalgo was born under the brilliant azure of that sky, to the cooing of its breezes, in the midst of the serenity of its lakes, the poetry of its valleys, and the majestic harmony of its mountains and ranges."13

These painterly qualities that supposedly issue from a physical experience of the Philippines is inevitably noted, for instance with the phrase Roces used, writing at the end of the 20th century, about the "soft mystical atmosphere;"¹⁴ which mid-century writer Ignacio Manlapaz also thought important to remark: " [Hidalgo's] pictures are usually spread o'er with the enchantment of fine dreamy haze."¹⁵

That Filipino students of art and politics hardly find it striking—this consonance between the ideas held as articles of faith on either side of the centennial divide, and the sustained lofty tenor of the assertions—in truth raises disquieting questions. Not the least, why such stasis in interpretative work? (One respects the tenacity of cultural forms through time but must regard the persistence of particular analytic idioms, despite vast social changes, incredulously.) At least part of the answer is self-evident. The universe of interpretation is bound to the imperatives of Philippine nationalism. No one describes as stasis what is held as desirably durable: the biomorphically structured history of national emergence. That structure ordains that art, too, emerges plant-like from native loam towards the firmament of reason. This nation and its art are sealed off within a tautology, restrained to perpetual, mantra-like repeats of an evolutionary credo; which credo abides only a rhapsodic, heroic creativity.

Nevertheless, there are multiple dysfunctions between then and now. Recognizing the operations of similarity and reiteration within Philippine nationalism is merely a prelude to parsing out the differences; a requisite prelude nonetheless, because the similarity and reiteration, especially at the exalted levels deployed when it comes to Hidalgo and Luna, work to occlude the differences. Those buried differences are: firstly, shifts in the meaning and intent of key words, notably, ilustrado, Realism, Romanticism, Neoclassicism, liberal and nationalism, not only through time, but vis-ŕ-vis different cultural and political spaces; and secondly, equally profound changes in the relationship between power and the variously construed public domain. An archeology in the Foucauldian sense is urgent, and should be taken up by the Philippine academe; this essay attempts to sketch out the sight lines for such an archeology. Pending that work, a good place to start excavating is the conceptual site where Hidalgo and Luna were first dramatically absorbed into political discourse.