Hidalgo and Luna: Vexed Modernity (page 6 of 8) 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | Genius Juan Luna, writing privately:   "Con respeto a las criticas, yo le dire y le he dicho que son mis pensamientos, mejor aun, mis impresiones. ¿Como quieres tu ahora que tome en cuenta si me desafian en tu peri6odico? Mis impresiones han sido para ti, pues yo no pretende convertir con la pluma ni con la palabra, medios estos de que no me ha dotado la madre Naturaleza, y que, segun tu, sirven para publicar los secretos del alma; le confieso, pues, que no podre inculcar los secretos del arte moderno, que es el mismo antiguo, porque se cimenta en la verdad, que es el escalon indispensable para lo sobrenatural, es decir, sobrenaturalcuando el artifice o confeccionador es un genio...Mucho me alegrare verte por aqui a ver la Exposicion Universal, en donde abunda lo feo util, lo util para que los pueblos se engrandeszcan cultivando la inteligencia, esta es la gran Galeria de Maquinas; para mi, pues, estan en decadencia aquellos pueblos que no han sabido sustituir la fuerza bruta por la fuerza de la inteligencia que han creado estas maquinas para el bienestar de los pueblos, pueblos en donde mas se cultiva la inteligencia y en donde se rinde mas culto a la poesia, a la musica, a la pintura..."37 Contemplating modernization, Luna articulates his own matrix of relations between and among truth, the divine, art, technology and the human condition. Genius is central to his scheme of things. Antiquity and modernity are similarly ordered by truth, the "indispensable stepping-stone" to the supernatural—provided that the maker is a genius. Technological advances enable aesthetic cultivation. Social welfare is that capacity for cultivation, hence technology has an instrumental relation to emancipation, This cluster of ideas allowed for the melding of the divine within the religion of progress, whose principal illusion during this period was the promise of social equity through industrialization. It sounds like the statement of Victor Hugo—"Progress is the footstep of God himself. "—but not upon close reading. For in 19th century Paris, Hugo's statement would have been understood, particularly by those awed by the universal expositions, as everything, including art, in the service of Progress deified. Luna's formulation went in another direction: everything, including progress, in the service of social welfare and aesthetic refinement, towards divine truth. In this sense, the outstanding virtuosity that makes for genius is cast in spiritual terms.

The contrast shows a Luna compelled by what I characterize in this essay as a vexed modernity: the embrace of ideas circulating in 19th century Europe, but reconfigured in his soul to align with deeper allegiances. From the evidence of this letter, the radical secularism of modernity was not among his deeper allegiances. Luna's dichotomy between "brute force" and "the power of the intellect" is a neoclassicism of the kind that would have been part of Academy curriculum; it also resonates with the Medieval dyad between body and soul, that would have been an assumption in frayle teaching back home. As for the matter of genius and its access to godhead, one thinks instantly of, again, the medievalism deus artifex; or the early Renaissance neoplatonism, alter deus (in the sense that Leonardo da Vinci called the artist signore e Dio.) It seems fairly clear that in Luna's usage, genius was classically defined; and informed, ahistorically enough, by the Romantic framing of genius vis-á-vis the creative imagination and the ability to feel intensely. In at least this one letter, that Luna spoke of genius at a distance from the late 19th century notion that normatively twinned genius and madness or mental illness. (It is sadly ironic, then, that the still-outraged 20th century descendants of Luna's in-laws make a point of the violent—"not normal"—behavior of the artist and his brother Antonio, keeping distant from all talk of genius.) Luna's modernity, genius-driven, pulled away from modernity. Which should alert Luna scholars to the possibility that the man remained a tourist in late 19th century Western Europe; that he did not—perhaps could not—inhabit the notion of contemporaneity.

The Realist double disavowal—of the Enlightenment's abstract, universal truths, and of the Romantic recovery of the soul from the alienation produced by that Enlightenment—would drive European artists and writers from the mid-19th century to seek, confront and express truths in the form of concrete minutiae. Hence the proliferation in (particularly French) painting and literature of quotidian images of city life, industrial production, railroad and racetrack activities, wasted humanity and bourgeois pleasures like picnics: the stuff of common-ness become the stuff of a revolutionary politics. It was this politico-aesthetic space opened up by Realism ("...the day is coming when a single original carrot will be pregnant with revolution..."³⁹) that would in due course allow imperialism itself to be contested. Luna's emancipatory project could only have been possible to think, within a specific history that already benefited from the Realist twist on both the Enlightenment and Romantic projects. The twist: that the heroic (and this includes genius) could only be viewed as suffusing the mundane flow of modern experience; otherwise the heroic (and with it, genius) could no longer be a vital idea. Luna, who painted with bravura brushstrokes that called attention to virtuosity—indeed a heroic virtuosity—and who used in his big efforts the very Greco-Roman grand quotation that Realism rejected, could not have drawn political force from that Realism.

Hidalgo occupied the same vexed, and vexing position. It was not only that his Virgenes allowed him entree into an art world directly in the service of an aristocracy whose time was past. It was that such servile art represented a domain of (Salon) art-making that accepted an aesthetically and politically diminished role for artists in a Europe riveted by other artists whose ambition was no less than the re-arrangement of ways of thinking. No matter what Hidalgo's true nationalist passion may have been, that diminished domain of art-making squared properly only with reactionary, "official" nationalism. (And I quickly add that I am by no means: saying that Impressionism and subsequent isms had unvexed links with a purer nationalist stream. No such thing as purer.) Hidalgo's Dante in La Barca de Aqueronte and La Laguna Estigia exhibited a universal Hell, not the hell of, say, a 19th century foundry. It would be a dreadful mistake to aver, yet again, that this was simply a stylistic choice. For this was a choice that exhibited the artist absorbed by or within a Medieval (via Romantic) imagination. The Christian God was there as fundamental force in his universe, mystically embodied and transported administratively from antiquity to modernity in the regnum, the kingdom. Here again, therefore, is a modernity that preserved a counter-secular dynamic. And with this God living robustly at the heart of the particular version of colonialism operating in las islas filipinas, it may not be all too wild an assertion to say that this art was cultural capital invested in the imperial status quo-despite the overt signs of the erosion of that status quo, and despite even the artist's own desire for social transformation.

Hidalgo in fact appeared to have kept himself distant—serenely and unselfconsciously—from the intellectual and political demands of much art-making of his time:

"...Occupied here with my brushes and my imagination in the world of dreams, time passes me by without my being aware of it...I have spent the months of July and August outdoors by the seashore of Clareute Tuferieure where I have taken in good air and vigor and [with these] notes and studies in nature for my paintings, by means of photographs as much as through painted sketches."40

If Hidalgo's interpreters are on the mark in asserting and celebrating the artist's complete devotion to art (presumably in contradistinction to art-and-politics, but also regarded as a form of nationalist devotion)—then they demand a hard look at the oeuvre itself. The distance from contemporaneity expressed serenely in the first sentence of the section of the letter to Pedro Paterno quoted above, connects clearly with the information given in the next sentence. "...notes and studies in nature for my paintings" is a technical approach perhaps stubbornly preserved contra the plein-air enthusiasms of his contemporaries. One must remember that pleinairisme work was less a style, or affectation, or moda, or methodological device, than it was an expression of the will to un-learn an order of things thought too eroded or corrupt to countenance. "And even if we beg the question," wrote art historian Linda Nochlin, "by saying that a style—any style—is by definition no more than a series of conventions, we must still admit that the Realists made a very stringent effort to fight clear of existing ones and to battle their way through to new, less shopworn, and more radically empirical formulations of their experience."⁴¹ From this perspective, the distant-ness, abstraction, and dreaminess in Hidalgo's landscapes and outdoor portraits confirm—politically, this time—a disinclination to conduct matters into crisis. That he was not drawn towards location-specific and time-bound grit is well-noted in the 1iterature on him. But it is important to furthermore point out that his idealizing bent was not an ethically neutral stance; was a vote in favor of art that is subservient to rather than critical of power; and was a proclivity that would not bring forward an emancipatory momentum.