Juan Luna: The Filipino as Painter
by Santiago Albano Pilar
Introduction by Nick Joaquin
Photographic Reproductions by Dick Baldovino
12-1/4" x 10", 268 pages, hardbound, 1980

This book is the first full-length biography of Juan Luna, and may well be the definitive one, its author, Santiago Pilar, being an authority on Philippine art history. In graphic detail has he recreated the various backgrounds of Luna's brief but turbulent life.

Colonial Manila in the 1870s, where Luna passed his adolescence. Madrid and Rome in the 1880s, when he won his first triumphs. The Paris of la Belle Époque, a glittering stage for his tragic marriage. And the Philippines of the revolutionary era, where, like many an expatriate, he found that, as the saying puts it, "you can't go home again."

Vividly traced is Luna's arduous journey to recognition, from the early hurting encounters with bias and prejudice, through the development of a grand style and the genesis of the great works, to his apotheosis as Maestro: an artist crowned with honors in the art capitals of the world.

Especially intriguing, and bound to be controversial, is Santiago Pilar's dictum on the Luna style, which some modern critics describe as "impressionistic" —or at least influenced by impressionism then so fashionable among the avant-garde. It is Pilar's contention that Luna, far from being attracted by the new style, faulted it as sloppy; and that when he seems to exhibit its loose brushwork he's actually merely doodling, usually for preliminary study. What really deeply influenced his mature period was "social realism," the extension into art of the socialist movement. However, despite experiments in what would now be called "proletarian art," the basic style of Luna remained classical, because classic dignity was what he desired for the Filipino and his dreamt-of republic.

Such careful analyses of Luna's art are coupled in this book with penetrating analyses of Luna's personality, which inevitably climax in the horror of the love-hate relationship with his wife, Paz Pardo de Tavera, and the dreadful end of their life together. This portrait of an artist is also the absorbing story of a most unhappy marriage. And more than just another coffee-table book is this serious effort at critical biography, a badly and sadly neglected field of writing in the Philippines.