Montalban Landscape:
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 223.
Boy with a Hat:
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 286.
These two subjects, painted back-to-back on a Masonite board, show two facets of Anita Magsaysay-Ho, then a maiden just known as Anita Magsaysay.
\n“Boy with a Hat,” one of Anita’s earliest paintings
\nAnita in her “Amorsolo Era”
\nThe first side of the composition, titled Boy with a Hat, is one of the very few paintings of males that Anita did in her entire life. “To paint men, I would have to have models; women, I draw from memory,” she once said in an interview with Archipelago Magazine in the ‘80s.
\nBoy with a Hat is also one of Anita’s earliest paintings to enter the market. In December of last year, Léon Gallery had the privilege of auctioning a 1934 genre painting by Anita titled Lavanderas by the Stream, which was also the first time a work from Anita’s earliest years as a painter was seen by the public.
\nWhen Anita painted Boy with a Hat, she was in the final year of her studies at the UP School of Fine Arts, the bastion of classic art headed by Fabian de la Rosa. Anita was particularly influenced by Fernando Amorsolo, then the most famous and prolific painter in the Philippines. He was instructor of the courses “Landscape” and “Drawing from Life” during Anita’s senior year.
\n“During our time, I would think Fernando Amorsolo was the most influential. We all used to paint like him,” she would say in an October 1984 interview with art critic Cid Reyes. “We had no basis—an idea or criterion—of what good art really was. That’s why, even then, I was already advocating for some kind of a museum, even just a museum of prints. We had no museum at all. Since Fernando Amorsolo was our teacher, and his paintings were so beautiful, we all painted like him.”
\nThe painting shows Anita in her conservative beginnings. The subject is very Amorsolo: a peasant boy wearing his rattan sombrero, rendered in quick strokes with contrasting effects of light and dark areas. Anita may have painted this work in her class “Advanced Oil Painting 3,” helmed by De la Rosa and where students tackle “advanced problems in picture and portrait making with particular regard to composition and harmony of color.” In this course, students paint in situ based on “living and nude costumed models, half and full figures.”
\n“Montalban Landscape,” Anita’s foray into Modernism
\nA wartime gem
\nThe other side, titled Montalban Landscape, was painted at the height of the chaos and destruction that was the Second World War. The work is an impressionistic depiction of the mountains of Montalban in Rizal Province, now a go-to haven among mountaineers—especially among Metro Manila residents who want to briefly escape the hustle and bustle of the city—for its scenic hiking sites, notably the “Montalban Trilogy” consisting of Mounts Pamitinan, Binacayan, and Hapunang Banoi.
\nAnita’s swift and candid strokes emphasize that the subject was painted on the spot, en plein air. Her modernist flair is exhibited: bold, vigorous strokes, strong colors, and the eschewing of depth in favor of flatness. The strong tension between color and form results in a dynamically textured work. These are the lasting effects of her studies in the School of Design, headed by none other than modernist strongman Victorio Edades. “Mr. Edades was a very inspiring teacher,” Anita said in her memoirs. “He taught history very well and enlightened us on Cezanne and the Impressionists. From him, I learned how to use colors in a modern way.”
\nTwo “Anitas” in One
\nAnita brought her 1934 work Boy with a Hat and her painting materials when she and her family evacuated to Montalban at the height of the war. The land was rife with scarcity, and survival was the name of the game. Artists and their profession/vocation were not spared, as painting materials also became meager. As such, artists like Anita had to improvise to continue pursuing their hearts’ passions. For instance, Vicente Manansala mixed old, hardened paints with coconut oil. The more well-off Anita still relied on her oil paints, albeit recycling her boards and painting on them back-to-back.
\nThe result is two paintings in one that show Anita’s evolution: from her “Amorsolo Era” to her breaking away from the confines of tradition and entering her formidable, modernist phase, of which she would be placed in the highest ranks of the foremost Filipino painters of the post-war era.
\nThe Great Escape to Montalban
\nMontalban bore witness to Anita and her family’s great escape from the impending bloodshed and battle for the capital city’s liberation. When the war was nearing its climax, Anita and her family moved to Montalban. They 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.”
\nAnita 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.”
\nIdyllic painting during the wartime era
\nLife in Montalban was more relaxed, in contrast to their Pasay home, where she recalled of “hardly stepp[ing] out of [their] house as there were many Japanese sentries stationed in the streets. Luckily, we had a brave cook who went to the market every day for fresh food.” In Montalban, Anita was surrounded by the towering mountains and the lush landscapes that all contributed to a relatively calmer sense of spirit. It was in this environment that Anita painted several of her idyllic landscapes.
\nMontalban Landscape powerfully echoes Anita’s sentiments during the war, recalling a poem she wrote in 1944 that resoundingly spoke of her yearnings for freedom, a liberated motherland where she can “glorify my country’s grandeur, her mountains and hills, the valleys rich with harvest, her rivers and her hills.”
\nAnita also taught her friends the fundamentals of drawing. “We met many, many friends in Montalban,” Anita wrote. “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.”
\nAnita and her family would eventually return to their Pasay home when food in Montalban grew more expensive. Luckily, they and their material property would be spared from the ensuing horror that was to come, thanks to a family friend named Dr. Veloso, who offered the comforts and security of his abode. (Anita recalled that they had to walk carefully through a mined road towards the doctor’s house along Libertad Street.) (Adrian Maranan)
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