{"status":true,"msg":{"data":{"id":61608,"auction_id":209,"set_id":242,"lot_number":"30","artist":"Anita Magsaysay-Ho (1914 - 2012)","title":"Two Women in Brown","starting_price":16000000,"signed_dated":"signed and dated 1960 (lower right)","medium":"gold enamel and tempera","size":"22 1/2\" x 17 1/2\" (57 cm x 44 cm)","property":null,"coa":"Accompanied by a certificate signed by the artist confirming the authenticity of this lot","provenance":"Philippine Art Gallery
\nPrivate collection, Asia","exhibited":"Philippine Art Gallery, Christmas Group Show, Manila, 20 December 1960 - 10 January 1961","literature":null,"write_up":"The Pioneer and The Painter: Carol Guerrero’s Visionary Gallery And Her Enduring Bond With Anita Magsaysay-Ho
by ISIDRA P. REYES
When Carolina Gonzalez Guerrero opened The Rear Room Gallery in 1975, she was already a multi-hyphenate career woman: a journalist-art critic, but also a radio station and TV producer, as well as a stage actress and fashion designer.
Carolina was born in Manila on 4 November 1921, the only child of Rafael Gonzalez of Bulacan and his first wife, Felisa Pañgan, of Pampanga. Her father was a navy engineer. After Rafael and Felisa were separated, Carolina never reconnected with her biological mother. She was raised by her stepmother, the former Ludivina Torres, who taught her how to draw as a child. Carolina fell in love and married Architect Roberto Ma. Henry Guerrero, “a scant two weeks before the first Japanese planes strafed Manila.” Roberto Ma. was born on 20 January 1911, one of ten children of Dr. Luis Ma. Alvarez Guerrero and Adela Aguilar Henry, one of eight children of the wealthy French businessman and Consul for Brazil to the Philippines. Like several of their eminent Guerrero relatives, Dr. Luis’ family lived in Ermita at 148 Isaac Peral Street (now U.N. Avenue), Manila
Roberto Ma. and Carolina had seven children: Adrian (b. 1942), Roberto Ma., Jr., (d. 1944), Rafael Ma. (b. 1946), Francis Xavier (b. 1954), Regina “Ginie” (b. 1957), Christian Joel (b. 1958), and Amapola (b. 1972). After the war, Carolina finished a course in journalism and began writing reviews of concerts, opera, and ballet. Her reviews caught the eye of publishing magnate Don Ramon A. Roces who hired her at age 28 as society editor of the leading news broadsheet, The Manila Times.
With her flair for fashion, Carolina was encouraged by her friends, Salvacion and Purificacion “Puring” Lim of Slim’s to reinvent herself as a fashion designer.
However, in 1975, after twenty two years of making both ready-to-wear and custom-made wear, Carolina, now called “Carol,” decided to close shop and convert her space into an art gallery-cum-bookshop named Rear Room Gallery.
Carol Guerrero’s Rear Room was one of several galleries in Manila established by women.
Upon her entry into the art business, Carol had already developed friendships with artists such as Anita MagsaysayHo and Harvard-trained art historian, Dr. Rod Paras-Perez.
From 1976-1978, Carol was 1st Vice-President of the Art Association of the Philippines (AAP) and worked hand in hand with AAP President Rita Ledesma Gonzalez, daughter of AAP founding President Purita KalawLedesma, to revitalize the AAP. She also edited the AAP Liham, a colored quarterly broadsheet that published high-powered critiques of art and helped establish guidelines for the art market. It was designed and laid out by Carol’s son, Raffy. Carol was the founding President of the Guild of Galleries, established in 1975 with Purita Kalaw Ledesma, Corito Araneta Kalaw, Odette Alcantara, Silvana Diaz, Lito David, Eva Toledo, Ray Albano, and Didit Generoso comprising its first set of officers from 1975-1976.
As recalled by Leonides V. Benesa in his article, “Rear Room Up from…,” the year Rear Room was inaugurated saw the proliferation of galleries due to an art boom. It was a gallery/bookshop where one could purchase not only art pieces but also Filipiniana books such as the Malolos Constitution, the Poems of Rizal in English, and the collected works of Marcelo H. del Pilar, as well as first issues and bound volumes of the art magazine Archipelago. The gallery also did its own framing at its own frame shop called Frame Up.
The Rear Room would exhibit works by established artists such as Napoleon Abueva and Solomon Saprid. They brokered the sale of Old Masters of Philippine Art, a kind of trading that one does hush-hush in the back or rear rooms. And exhibited for sale the works of Fernando Amorsolo, Jorge Pineda, and Juan Arellano.
Solomon Saprid opened his major astrological-themed solo exhibit, Scorpio Rising, in March 1979. Danny Pangan first showcased his innovative 3D painting series at the gallery during the 4th ASEAN Art Festival in 1984. Julie Lluch Dalena with her satirical sculptures of cactus forms, hearts and buttocks and Jaime de Guzman’s paintings which he called “historical allegories” participated in group showcases hosted or co-sponsored by the gallery.
Carol enjoyed her years in the art world and the friendships she forged with artists, fellow gallery owners, patrons, and critics. According to her daughter, Ginie, her mother said “they were a colorful bunch.” Among those who graced gallery openings were Anita Magsaysay-Ho, Carmen Guerrero Nakpil, Nora Saba, Consuelo Consing, Hermie Tecson, Cristina Ponce-Enrile, artists Napoleon Abueva and Oscar de Zalameda, and fashion designer Helena Carratala Guerrero whose brother, Ernesto, a Barcelona-based artist, had his show at the Rear Room Gallery.
The Rear Room Gallery closed its doors in 1988 after thirteen years in the business.
Carol took up painting, having studied under her artistfriends, Anita Magsaysay-Ho, Galo Ocampo, Dr. Rod Paras-Perez, and Ibarra de la Rosa, over the years. Carol passed away on 12 November 2017 at age 96, surviving her husband, Roberto Ma., by 46 years, who died on 9 January 1971 at age 59. She left five surviving children, many grandchildren, and a rich legacy of her many careers. Anita’s Last Tempera Painting from Her Golden Years An Experimental Painting in Enamel and Tempera from Anita’s Prime
by ADRIAN MARANAN
Anita Magsaysay-Ho: The Dilemma of Two Worlds
Towards the turn of the 1960s, Anita found herself between triumphs and personal predicaments. She had just been named one of the \"Six Most Outstanding Painters\" by the highly popular This Week Magazine as the only Filipina painter on the list. Her rare solo exhibitions always became the talk of the town. She had also easily grew as one of the, if not, the most influential artist of her time, with her dear friend Purita Kalaw-Ledesma recalling that after Anita's landmark sold-out Manila Hotel exhibition in 1949 (where she first showcased her egg tempera works), fellow artists, critics, collectors, and the public were stunned with the novelty of Anita's style and technique, her \"awkward, angular figures, mostly women...painted in egg tempera or oil\" as her crowning hallmark.
In her 1955 master's thesis, Purita noted that Anita's impact was so profound that \"artists were delightfully surprised to see the variety of media used [oil, egg tempera, watercolor, casein, wax, photogram, and collage], and the varied effects and wealth of possibilities that each medium could accomplish.\" She also wrote that after the exhibition, artists became more eager to explore mediums that suited their style and character, and local materials, such as achuete and añel, were explored as a means to search for a native identity in painting and to seek various ways to achieve luminosity in painting, the latter of which Anita exemplified. Anita even became one of the earliest luminaries for the young Jose Joya, whose gold-winning work at the 1952 Shell National Students Art Competition, \"Gossips,\" saw palpable influences of Anita's stylized figures. Anita also served as a judge in several AAP competitions and students art contests.
She bade goodbye to the 1950s on a high note by winning the Third Prize for her painting \"Mending the Nets\" at the 12th Annual Art Exhibition of the influential Art Association of the Philippines, a triumphant commencement to a decade that marked multiple wins at the AAP's competitions, the most notable of which are her wins at the 1950 (2nd Prize for \"Five Senses,\" which Leon Gallery had just auctioned last June for more than 52 million pesos) and 1952 (her historic 1st Prize nod for her now-iconic \"The Cooks,\" a first for a Filipina artist) annuals.
Anita was also honored as an alumna awardee by her alma mater, the Philippine Women's University, \"for meriting a place among modern painters because of the originality... of her paintings, and for initiating the...use of egg tempera, a product of her creativeness.\" In 1960, Anita again was at the height of success, solidifying her rightful throne as the foremost Filipina painter as she won the prestigious 1st Prize Anita’s Last Tempera Painting from Her Golden Years An Experimental Painting in Enamel and Tempera from Anita’s Prime by ADRIAN MARANAN Anita Magsaysay-Ho, pictured in her Forbes Park residence, two months before she flew to Sao Paulo, Brazil, in June 1962 to start a new life as an expatriate Filipina. © Woman and the Home, June 1962 at the 13th AAP Annual for her oil painting \"Two Women,\" making her the only Filipina artist then to win the top prize multiple times.
But it was also at the beginning of this decade that personal dilemmas involving Anita and her husband, Robert, heir to the shipping fortune of one of Shanghai's most prominent industrialist families, would unfold into a far-reaching situation for the couple. Never did Anita imagine that she could lose her precious Filipino citizenship due to her marriage to a Chinese man. In 1949, when the couple had just given birth to their first child, Helen, and it was time for Robert to return to his native China, where the Ho family would build their loving home in Shanghai, his father warned them not to continue to Shanghai as the revolutionary communists led by Mao Tse-tung were nearing the city.
Stationed in Manila, Anita hoped for Robert to be granted Filipino citizenship by virtue of their marriage. At the Philippine Immigration Office, Anita asked about the status of their marriage on Philippine soil, where she was confronted with an adverse revelation. She recalled in her memoirs.
\"I paid a visit to the Philippine Immigration to find out about our status. I believed then, or at least I was hopeful, that because I was a Filipina, Robert would be made a permanent resident. But no, to my great shock, I was told not only that my husband could not be a resident, but that I was no longer a Filipino citizen but a Chinese! I explained that I had never owed allegiance to China, but to no avail. They took away my Philippine passport. No amount of begging and crying and explaining could change their minds. I felt I had lost everything. So, here we were—Robert lost his country to the Communists, and I lost mine. I, who loved my country so much!\"
Drowning in an unfortunate sea, Anita, Robert, and their children dwelled as aliens on Philippine soil, a limbo they would endure for the entirety of the '50s and the early '60s.
Bereft of the privileges of her Filipino citizenship, Anita nonetheless ensured that her sense of being Filipino inside would never be subdued even by the powers that be. She had her art and her fond memories of idyllic childhood summers in Zambales as her bedrock—the essence of her Filipina identity.
As Anita entered the 1960s, she was again caught in what was perhaps her biggest personal dilemma—leave her beloved Philippines in search of a new home country and relinquish her thriving art career or perpetually exist as a stateless being.
Two Women in Brown, one of Anita's last paintings in the Philippines during her prime
Throughout the '50s, the Ho family lived in Manila, with their last home in the city being in Paco, where she painted The Cooks and which she lovingly described in her memoirs as \"the most enjoyable house we lived in.\" The family would move to posh Forbes Park in 1959, residing in a house designed by the young Leandro Locsin, located on Palm Avenue, and neighboring the homes of the Campos Yaos and Glecy and Bennie Tantoco. Meanwhile, Anita's husband became busier than ever in running Magsaysay Lines and participating in the Filipino Shipowners Association, championing and helping to draft what would become the landmark Philippine Overseas Shipping Act of 1955.
While the Ho family had seemingly found stability, Anita and Robert had that profound discomfort of not being able to fully navigate the social, legal, and business side of their lives, as they were considered aliens in the country they called home (Robert was just granted a working visa as a prearranged employee of Magsaysay Lines). At the urging of Robert's father, who had been a Brazilian citizen for nine years, Robert, together with Anita and their children Helen, Linda, Doris, Robert Alexander, and Steven, migrated to the South American nation in June 1962. \"It was a difficult decision,\" Anita said in her memoirs. \"I did not want to leave my parents…It was, I believed, important for the family to have a country again.\"
Two Women in Brown would become one of Anita's last paintings in the Philippines, signalling the curtain call of what has become one of the most commanding and most victorious prime years for a Filipino artist, unparalleled only by a select few.
The work would also become her last paintings for a while, as she would not create any when she and her family settled in Sao Paolo, Brazil. \"I did not do any painting,\" Anita recalled in her memoirs. Roces also wrote in the artist's monograph that \"This ordeal of uprooting and resettling her family drained all of Anita's energies. Except for a brief stint at porcelain painting, she found little time or motivation to paint seriously throughout their stay in Brazil.\"
Instead, the family focused on other matters, including learning Portuguese, Brazil's official language, and singing along to the piano played by her eldest daughter, Helen, at night, turning their mundane evening into a symphony of love and belongingness in a newfound country. Anita became a full-time housewife. She bore the responsibility of looking for a house in a suitable location (Robert was away most of the time, attending to his expanding office in Tokyo), finding house helpers, and furnishing their new home.
Many of Anita's works in the succeeding decades (she would devote herself to painting again in 1967 when four of her children had gone to boarding school) would be painted in various cities, each successively becoming a new home in the Ho family's overseas odyssey and where Robert could see the prospects of having to smoothly run their shipping business: Tokyo, Vancouver, Montreal, and Hong Kong, with occasional interludes in Manila for short visits.
A symbol of the PAG’s twilight years.
Anita painted Two Women in Brown in their lovely Forbes Park home, which she once deemed a home she couldn't \"describe how beautiful it was.\" In the same year this work was painted, Anita had been busy joining the Philippine Art Gallery's ninth anniversary exhibition and working on her gold-winning entry to the 13th AAP Annual, similarly titled to the work on offer in this auction. This painting also represents the twilight years of the Philippine Art Gallery, encapsulating the beginning of the end for the legendary gallery. After its salad years of 1951 to 1957, the PAG began declining due to a hodgepodge of mainly financial difficulties. Mounting unpaid rent dues, artists complaining about unpaid shares from their sales because their money was being used to pay for the PAG's back rentals, and, sadly, relatively lower sales of the PAG artists compared to those of the Amorsolo school artists, whose romantic, conservative works on display at Mabini Street near the PAG were more saleable, especially to foreigners looking for souvenirs. Purita Kalaw-Ledesma noted in her book on the history of the PAG that the conservatives who exhibited at the Luneta \"could collect a total of as much as P3,000, while PAG exhibitions could gather a maximum of P300 a month.\" Running the gallery also became sloppy, as its financial problems made it resort to unusual side operations, including running a hotcake shop.
Arguilla's declining health due to liver cancer and her subsequent death in 1969 was the final blow to the PAG, with the gallery ceasing operations in December 1969.
Attached at the back of this painting is the official PAG sticker tag, detailing its title, medium and its serial number pegged at \"PAG No. 4023.” The work may have been exhibited at the PAG’s Christmas group show, held from 20 December 1960 to 10 January 1961. There was a 9th anniversary presentation by the PAG held earlier in the year. However, Anita had a different entry, an oil painting titled “Pagtatahip.”
The PAG’s annual holiday presentations were primarily “sales shows,” allowing patrons and collectors to bring home right away their purchases—for their personal enjoyment or to be given as Christmas gifts, while the exhibit is still under way. The PAG's last locations were 462 Arquiza Street in Ermita and No. 3 Saint Williams Street in Cubao. The Luz Gallery, established by Arturo Luz in 1960 at Herran Street (now Pedro Gil), inherited the PAG's legacy, becoming the new arbiter of taste, value, and artistic integrity. Two Women in Brown is a poignant memento of the legendary gallery’s waning days: where artistic debates were thrown off, where artists and writers supplemented and complemented each other's ideas, where the dream to broaden one's creative horizons through foreign travels were once envisioned, and where many collectors started to cultivate and build their own troves, ultimately becoming vanguards of the modernist cause.
Thus, this painting represents the end of an era and the dawning of a new one: the end of Anita's prolific \"Philippine Period,\" her prime decades of the 1950s to the early 1960s, the end of the PAG, and the start of her new life as an expatriate Filipina.
An Experimental Anita
Two Women in Brown is Anita's last known tempera work during her prime years. In fact, it is her only known tempera painting from the 60s, and she only did less than 10 works in that formidable medium beginning in the mid-50s due to her deepening commitments as a mother of five children. Tempera would be absent in her oeuvre for more than forty years until her exciting return to her most beloved medium in the mid-2000s, when she finally returned to the Philippines to settle permanently in her motherland. But the most notable technical aspect of this work is Anita’s stimulating experimentation in enamel, a medium she most rarely used in her works. Here, gold enamel paint is used to accentuate certain areas to achieve sleek, lustrous layers, e.g., the sunlight reflecting on the mountain slopes and bouncing on the women's saya (skirt), and the golden yellow sheaves of harvested palay.
Enamel was quite a popular medium among the modernists of the post-war period, reflecting the era's high degree of experimentation and creative excitement. Many of Anita's fellow modernists tried their hand at enamel, including Vicente Manansala for his 1951 painting \"Jeepneys\" and 1954 work \"Altar Credo\" (both in the Ateneo Art Gallery Collection), H.R. Ocampo for his 1952 work \"Cell Fossils,\" and Arturo Luz, who enjoyed the medium for its viscosity and iridescence. Luz utilized the medium in many of his early works during the 50s to the early 60s.
The enamel paint also emphasizes the work's setting: the golden hours of post-sunrise, when farmers begin their day and harvest their bountiful crop before the afternoon sun strikes the field with scorching summer heat. The harvest period during the dry season peaks in April, coinciding with Anita's summer vacations in Zambales. Men and women both partake in the harvest, selecting and cutting mature palay using scythes and sickles, and bundling the golden grains into sheaves.
Anita's experimentation can be seen in how she veered away from her usual practice of preparing her tempera, this time mixing the egg yolk with less water, alongside her pigments that she herself ground. This results in more vibrant, highly saturated, and opaque colors that complement the glossy finish of the enamel. Anita first painted the entire picture with tempera, allowing the cross-hatched layers of paint to dry and the moisture to evaporate for at least 24 hours. Enamel, mostly oil-based and hydrophobic, is then applied by the artist using fine brushes, creating layers of slick highlights and textural effects that brim against the matte, tempera painting. The juxtaposition of the dominant color, the warm sienna browns, with the glossy enamel produces strong tonal contrasts, interweaving areas of lightness and darkness and thus injecting boldness that captures the earthy tones and rustic atmosphere of Anita's beloved Zambales countryside.
Through her trademark angular distortion of the figures— her bold, awkward lines that strongly suggest arrested motion and dynamic rhythm—Anita conveys that her memories actively played and held that much weight for her as a mature artist. The earthy browns accented by the gold enamels endow textural palpability to the work, as if we are touching her mind and transported to a vision of Anita's lived experience, her resonating and idyllic memories of her yesteryears in the mountainous Zambales landscape. These are scenes that Anita vividly remembered from her childhood: women transplanting the rice seedlings into a bigger paddy field, farmers with sheaves of rice to prepare for the planting season in June, and women pounding rice, which Anita actually experienced when she was around 10 to 11 years old.
Showing Anita's high regard for the classical foundations of painting, the painting's composition follows the classic Renaissance triangular principle, highlighting the tight-knit unity of countryside folks, particularly its women, to whom Anita had always empathized. The dominant sienna browns lend warmth to the work, sharing Anita's deep devotion to the countryside Filipina, whom she always praised for the inherent dignity in their labor, their moments of joy and laughter, their tenacity of spirit, and the shared pride in their communal bond. As Anita said, the Filipina is \"naturally gregarious and effusive. We tell each other what we will do, and how we feel about things.\"
Capturing mood and atmosphere through the harmonious tension between color, texture, and movement, and her ability to integrate her modernist style with her conservative roots made Anita stand out from the male-dominated modernist movement. Painting interacting in pairs, another Anita trademark, also bestows further compositional balance. As seen in this work, the two women converse with each other, sharing their feminine sensibilities. Their gazes are locked in deep engagements, and their mouths convey stories and gossip, all the while concurrently focused on their labor. Their elaborate gestures evoke the Filipino's peculiar body language while chattering (think of the lip-points, the sharp side-eye glances and eyebrow flashings, the comical taps and grabs), especially in the heat of working, to relieve some of the strains and tensions.
The importance of practicing this classical compositional technique also allowed Anita to show her ingrained inseparability from her childhood recollections, as her paintings became mementos of her gentle, pastoral living in the countryside. Her memories became quaint relics of beautiful melancholia that she could always bring wherever in the world fate may bring her.
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