{"status":true,"msg":{"data":{"id":57534,"auction_id":116,"set_id":150,"lot_number":"110","artist":"Nena Saguil (1924 - 1994)","title":"a.) Portrait of a Young Woman\nb.) Portrait of a Young Man as \nDr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde","starting_price":1000000,"signed_dated":"a) signed and dated 1950 (lower right)
\noil on canvas
\n7 1/2\" x 6 1/2\" (19 cm x 17 cm)","medium":"signed and dated 1950 (lower right)
\noil on canvas
\n7 1/2\" x 6 1/2\" (19 cm x 17 cm)","size":null,"property":"PROPERTY FROM A DISTINGUISHED COUPLE","coa":null,"provenance":null,"exhibited":"Ateneo Art Gallery, Nena Saguil: Landscapes and Inscapes / From \nthe Material World to the Spiritual, Quezon City, 19 September - 10 \nDecember 2003","literature":"Torres, Emmanuel. Nena Saguil: Landscapes and Inscapes / From \nthe Material World to the Spiritual. Published in conjunction with the \nexhibition of the same title at the Ateneo Art Gallery in 2003. Quezon \nCity: Ateneo Art Gallery and ART DRUCK Inc., 2003. Full-color illustration \non page 57 and painting description on page 56.","write_up":"Uncovering the Secrets of Nena Saguil Enigmatic Portraits of Saguil’s Pride and Prejudice by ADRIAN MARANAN

As much as Nena Saguil is now seen as a towering feminist figure in Philippine art—owing much to her banner of \"firsts\" (she was the first Filipina to take painting as a full-time career, even becoming the first Filipina to champion the cause of avant-garde painting that was non-objectivism in the early 1950s, which further strove to break away from what is conventionally beautiful in Filipino art)—modern-day definitions of feminism did not really fit Saguil’s disposition. In her own circumstances and experiences, feminine authority and power were primarily manifested through her animosity towards being dominated by men. This is especially seen in this pair of portraits, titled Portrait of a Young Woman and Portrait of a Young Man as Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.

These two portraits were exhibited at the 2003 Saguil retrospective mounted at the Ateneo Art Gallery titled Nena Saguil: Landscapes and Inscapes: From the Material World to the Spiritual, held from September to December 2003. The petite pieces form part of Saguil's early works and are classified by art critic Eric Torres (who also served as the retrospective’s curator) under her \"Experimental Period\" of 1950 to 1954, which also overlapped with her \"Academic/Romantic Period\" of the mid-1940s to 1952. Saguil's experimental phase, wrote Torres, sees her \"experimenting in other modernist idioms like Surrealism, Expressionism, and pure abstraction, such as in those Kandinsky-ish 'free form' entries she submitted to the First Exhibition of Non-Objective Art in Tagala in 1953…even as she was painting Philippine subject matter in the 1950s.\"

Torres described these two portraits in the book published in conjunction with the exhibition. \"These two small portraits make a pair best hung cheek by jowl so that the young lady appears to be looking suspiciously at the young man.\" Torres wrote. \"The scorn of the urban young lady in bobbed hair and bangs bearing against the man at right is supposed to reflect Saguil's misandry, i.e., her mistrust of men in general.”

Seeing past her post-war portraits of beautiful, sumptuous ladies and paintings depicting vibrant images of able bodied men and women partaking either in the joy of toiling in the fields or relishing the idyllic barrio life, a surrealist and profoundly enigmatic Nena Saguil unfolds on the outskirts.

Portrait of a Young Woman represents none other than Saguil herself, with the short hair harkening back to her kolehiyala look of her UP Fine Arts bloom of youth: classic bob hairstyle, smokey eyes, thinly penciled downturned eyebrows, cupid’s bow lips, and an overall striking makeup reminiscent of the flapper look that made Saguil the \"cynosure of male eyes on campus,\" as recounted by Torres through his conversations with Corito Kalaw-Araneta, who said that Anita Magsaysay-Ho remembered her colleague

Saguil as \"often seen between classes surrounded by boys. She might have been a shy, quiet, young lady by nature, but was also not quite the mahinhin (modest) Maria Clara archetype of Jose Rizal's time, at least on campus in the 1930s.

On the other hand, Portrait of a Young Man as Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde takes inspiration from the classic 1886 English Gothic Horror novel, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. In the novel, Dr. Jekyll is an intelligent scientist who aims to separate the good from the evil and contain them into two distinct identities. This mad experiment resulted in the birth of his alter-ego, Mr. Hyde, a ruthless character possessing no repentance nor accountability. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde represent the contradiction and duality within us: a symbolism of our internal, innate struggles of rationality versus instinct, of good versus evil, between what we present as ourselves in broad daylight versus what we truly are behind closed doors in the still of the night.

Nena is a woman of both the arts and letters, unsurprisingly incorporating literary elements into her paintings. \"I think all the arts are the same,\" she would later reveal in a 1974 interview with Cid Reyes. \"Each of the arts reinforces the other.\" Despite her tantalizing looks, Saguil was first and foremost

a strong-willed woman—and a secretive enchantress at most. In fact, she never publicly mentioned her being a niece to Juan Luna (although she took delight in it when she was much younger), anxious that the public might only recognize her as merely the legendary painter's relative, and not on the merits of her talent. Saguil strayed from her birth name of Simplicia, supposedly symbolizing the old world and therefore, evoking old age, and baptized herself as Nena, which means \"baby\" or \"darling\" in Spanish. Even her birth year cast doubts on her real age. These she had all done to cast spells of youth, especially in an ageist world where women past their twenties and thirties are considered \"too old and unattractive.”

Saguil's depiction of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde represents the Filipino cultural concept of \"doble kara\" or double faced. On the man's left side of his face is the dapper Dr. Jekyll, while on the right is Mr. Hyde, a ghoulish figure who

seemingly ominously appears behind the pungent smoke of a cigarette left by his \"twin.”

The portraits likely allude to a private chapter in the young Saguil's life, which Torres touches on in his book on the artist. Torres retells, \"[Nena] was not unattractive to men at all, receiving at least one marriage proposal in her salad years from a wealthy widower, reportedly an assemblyman from Cebu.”

Torres also added other details in the book's subsequent chapters, writing, \"[Nena] abhorred being dominated by a man, having already rejected a rich suitor back in the Philippines who had wanted to marry her for the 'wrong' reasons.”

Saguil's purported misandry came from this unfortunate experience. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde can be seen as symbols of Saguil's suitor: reputable and well-bred in form yet coarse and crude in essence, and whose motives we can only assume (Did the suitor pursue Saguil only to chase after and relish her physical appeal?). Saguil's life was private, shrouded in secrecy and symbolism like her paintings.

There are other paintings by Saguil in the early 1950s that tackle her alleged internal hatred of men. The Bride from 1953 depicts a forlorn woman and her scorn of marriage,

which she views as a lifetime imprisonment. The painting seems to depict Saguil refusing to kowtow to machismo. Another painting titled Power Room, also from 1953, shows Saguil unleashing her misandry into a full-blown vindictive metaphor tackling retribution against the patriarchy and the exploitation of women. Both works delve deep into Surrealist imagery.

There is also Saguil’s manuscript of a short story—an autobiography disguised as a work of fiction—titled Beside the River Seine: A Love Story, which she wrote in Paris within the span of nine years (1956 to 1965). The story tells of Nona (Nena's fictitious alter ego), a Filipina art student in Paris, who meets and falls in love with a French art student named Jean. According to Torres, the story lays out four answers as to why Saguil never married: she lost all hope of finding a man who fully understood her; she wanted to be in control of the relationship; she was still disgusted with the wealthy suitor who only wanted her \"for the wrong reasons,\" a narrative entirely related to the Cebuano assemblyman mentioned above; and \"she was prepared to forego love, marriage, and family in favor of Platonic friendship and transcendental/pantheistic love of nature.\"

There is an interesting line in the story that Torres highlighted, emphasizing that the ideal of love for Saguil is not to be found in men, but beyond what human rationality

and willpower could comprehend—a love that cuts across space and time, or as Torres put it, \"the Absolute.\"

Saguil wrote: \"All of a sudden, I felt the strange beauty of a dark water flowing so gently and so endlessly. I also felt that I would like to make love to it and be a part of that river.\"

It is possible that Saguil only looked up to men when it came to art and nothing but art. The two portraits combine Saguil's Surrealist and Fauvist influences. From Fauvism, Saguil experimented with unnaturalistic colors, sparkling the canvases with forceful intensity to amplify her Surrealist imagery. Notably, Post-Impressionism and its pillar, Paul Gauguin, particularly served as Saguil's primary influence, to which \"she owed awakening to the vigor of primitive art,\" wrote a This Week article dated 6 August 1950. Saguil had learned of Gauguin and the other avant-garde Western painters of the period through colored reproductions of their works in periodicals, such as A.V.H. Hartendorp's Philippine Magazine, Life Magazine, and—in the post-war period—art books published by Skira.

Inspired by Gauguin, Saguil imbues a plump form to the lady—a full-on contrast with the man, whose form is spare, slender, and uncanny, which Saguil used as a juxtaposing device to show her contempt for men.

In her letter to her favorite nephew, Benjamin Saguil, and his wife Delia, Nena included what Torres called a \"minuscule photocopy of an anonymous statement,\" which says: \"People who are not in a demanding profession feel a greater need for romantic companionship, but if your job [art] fulfills you, then that frequently is enough.”

Amid her resolute and at the same time, mystical persona, one thing remained clear. For Saguil, her art is the be-all and end-all, an element immeasurably more satisfying and gratifying than any physical and material pleasure.","lot_group":"PAINTING","lot_details_html":"

Nena Saguil (1924 - 1994)
a.) Portrait of a Young Woman
signed and dated 1950 (lower right)
oil on canvas
7 1/2\" x 6 1/2\" (19 cm x 17 cm)

b.) Portrait of a Young Man as
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
signed and dated 1950 (lower right)
oil on canvas
7 1/2\" x 6 1/2\" (19 cm x 17 cm)

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