Islamic Colonial (13th century to the present)

In Islamic art, the artists were influenced by the doctrine of Tawhid or unity of
God. This belief emphasizes the greatness of the divine being. Through the abstract
forms of patterns in the interior of the mosques, the believers can concentrate
mentally, thus divine unity is achieved.
In regards to architecture, all Islamic buildings are required to follow Tawhid and
other Islamic beliefs. Some parts of the mosque like the niche or mirhab must face
the west, must be oriented toward Mecca to show oneness with other Islamic
communities.

Okir decorations can be seen in Tausug and Sama houses, traditional boats,
weapons, musical instruments, and in textiles. It has been observed that Islamic arts
are in upward orientation like the panolong in torogan, the royal shelter of Maranao,
with the regard for heaven and in turning away from the “material earth.”

Spanish Colonial Period (1521 – 1898)

Most of the art forms during this era were religious arts for the purpose of
converting the Filipinos to Catholicism. Churches were a combination of both native
and European elements that is why art historians refer the style as colonial baroque
or Philippine baroque. Inside the churches were images of saints made out of wood
or ivory. They are displayed in decorative altars called the retablo. They brought
western musical instruments like the violin, pipe organ, the guitar and the piano.
They also introduced the pasyon or pabasa which is the biblical narration of Christ’s
passion in an improvised melody.

The awit and corrido grew among the lowland Christian communities of
Pampanga, Ilocos, Bicol and Iloilo. These were secular musical forms based from
European literature and history that were chanted stories popular among the
peasants. What also evolved during this period are the kundiman and the balitao.
The balitao are sentimental love songs. The kundiman is a song where the lyrics
talks about the love that is not reciprocated. It also spoke of resignation and fatalism.
An example is Kundiman ni Abdon, a kundiman which is a protest against the Martial
Law in the seventees and the song Bayan Ko which became popular during the EDSA
Revolution.

The Baybayin written on a big stone that was discovered in Ticao, Leyte was
believed to be a prayer intended for a safe journey by the sea. In Mindoro, the
Mangyans etched Baybayin script on the smaller nodes of bamboo poles to write
poems of courtship and emotional concerns.

During this era, religious processions where Catholic saints and scenes from
the bible were prevalent. During the 19th century, the zarzuela or sarsuwela, a
popular form of musical theater, an operetta of singing and dancing together with
prose dialogues was introduced by the Spaniards. At first zarzuela were in Spanish
and later they had the local one that is why it was termed sarsuwela. Severino Reyes
and Hermogenes Ilagan were the most distinguished playwrights with Atang dela
Rama as their leading actress.

Other arts forms during this period are the local theater forms like senakulo,
komedya, moro-moro, and the folk music and dance like the cariñosa, pandanggo,
polka, dansa and rigodon. The first senakulo which was the biblical account of
Christ’s passion and death on the cross was written by Gaspar Aquino de Belen in
1704. The komedya is categorized into two namely: komedya de santo or religious
komedya and secular komedya. The first category focuses on the life of Christ or any
saint where the actors with extravagant costumes choreographed the war scenes.
The moro-moro is an example of the second one involving a love story between a
Christian and a Muslim expressed in verse and clashes between them in dance form
resulting to the conversion and baptism of the Muslim character, then wedding
followed. The folk music and dance were traced from habañera, jota and tango
dance from Spain.

Doctrina Christiana was the first printed book in the Philippines containing
song lyrics, commandments, sacraments and other catechetical materials.

As we can observe, Spanish colonial period was mostly religious art.

American Colonial Period (1898-1940) to the Postwar Republic (1946-1969) Since the
Americans taught their language in the public school, Filipinos wrote plays in
English like the one written by Lino Castillejo and Jesus Araullo in 1915 entitled A
Modern Filipina, the first ever play written in English.

During this period, the Americans introduced the Vaudeville that originated
from France and became popular in the Philippines and was locally called bodabil.

This is actually a collection of slapsticks, songs, dances, acrobatics, comedy

skits, chorus girls, magic acts, and stand-up comic acts.
In the realm of architecture, the architect and urban planner Daniel Burnham was
commissioned by the American government to design Baguio and Manila. He
implemented the Burnham plan and employed Neoclassic architecture. This is for its
government buildings, parks, and lawns. Neoclassic architecture may include
decorative sculptural elements housed in a pediment as shown by the National Art
Gallery. Some Filipinos were trained in the US or in Europe to design buildings
during this period. They were Tomas Mapua, Juan Arellano, Andres Luna de San
Pedro and Antonio Toledo.

During this period, there was a demand for artists who could do illustrations in
textbooks or graphic design for product labels. There was also the persistence of
still life, portrait paintings and inclination toward genre.
 Some of the artworks during this period were the Oblation (1935
original/1958 bronze cast found at the Up Oblation Plaza) at the University of the
Philippines and the Bonifacio Monument which consisted of life size figures in
dynamic poses demonstrating restraint, formality and elegance in a historical
tableau, 1933 in Caloocan. Both of these artworks were done by Guillermo
Tolentino. Fabian dela Rosa painted Planting Rice in 1921 and El Kundiman in 1930.
Fernando Amorsolo did a lot of portraits of prominent individuals and was a graphic
artist of the textbook series The Philippine Readers, made illustrations for the
newspaper The Independent the logo design for Ginebra San Miguel where a saint
trampled on a devil. This logo helped him study Fine Arts in Spain thru a grant given
by the company.

National Artist Victorio Edades painted in 1928 The Builders which presented
distorted figures of labouring workers. (Flaudetee May Datuin 2016)

Japanese Occupation (1941 – 1945)

The Japanese led the propaganda movement that would reject the Western
traditions. Art production was under the scrutiny of the Japanese government.
Expressions which were subversive by nature or anti- Japanese would tantamount to
torture and even death.
Felipe de Leon wrote Awit sa Paglikha ng Bagong Pilipinas, the anthem which spoke
of the loyalty to the nation reared in East Asia where Japan was actively asserting its
political power. It was said that he had been “commanded at the point of the gun” in
writing this anthem.

Genre paintings specially those expressing a neutral relationship between the

Filipinos and the Japanese showing the normality of life were the most widely
produced. The Japanese also preferred indigenous and pre-colonial traditions.
Examples of these are Crispin Lopez’ study of an Aeta, 1943 and Amorsolo’s
bombing of the Intendencia, 1942 and the Ruins of the Manila Cathedral, 1945.
Neo-Realism, Abstraction, and Other Modern Art Styles

The artists during this period wanted to produce works of art that would
reflect their national identity, an art that would expose the “true social conditions” of
the period. A group of artists showed a new kind of modernism and this was
observed by artist-writer E. Aguilar Cruz who named the movement Neo-Realism.
Many of these artists focused on folk themes and made commentaries on the urban
condition and the effects of war. The National Artist associated with this period were
Manansala, Legaspi and HR Ocampo. Manasala’s The Beggars, 1952 presents two
thin women with sad faces against a dark background indicating the dullness of
poverty. Most of Manansala’s paintings are characterized by transparent cubism, a
style of soft fragmentation of figures using transparent planes. Legaspi’s Gadgets II,
1949 shows half-naked men surrounded by machines depicting their hardship, their
expressionless faces as they function like machines. Most of Legaspi’s artworks have
distorted images by stretching or making rotund forms in a well-ordered
composition. Ocampo’s The Contrast, 1940, is a figurative artwork that reveals
human conditions amid the environment of modernity. He is recognized with his
combination of geometric and biomorphic shapes with lively colors.

In 1950, churches of modern architectural structures were constructed.

Among them were the Church of the Holy Sacrifice, 1955 and the Church of the Risen
Lord that made use of concrete material and tried on rounded or parabolic forms.
Another modern art that arose during this period is abstraction which consists of
simplified forms and avoided copied representation. It highlighted the relationship
of color, line and space or the flatness of the canvas rather an illusion of three
dimensionality. An example of this kind of art is Arturo Luz’ Street Musicians, 1952
who used stark linear elements and who trimmed down the figures into lines and
basic shapes. Fernando Zobel made use of used syringe in his paintings. In the
artworks of Constancio Bernardo and Lee Aguinaldo were solid geometric shapes
and color fields.

70s to Contemporary

When Martial Law was declared during the time of former President
Ferdinand Marcos, there was a rebirth of a long-lost civilization and aspiration to
modernization and development. The vision was to propagate and implement an art
and culture program that combined fine arts, architecture, interior design, tourism,
convention city building, engineering, urban planning, health and among others.
This optimism and rebirth were observed in the composition of Bagong Pagsilang by
Levi Celerio and Felipe de Leon Padilla.

Art was circulated through a network of institutions that braided the threads of
the pre-modern, vernacular, the modern and the international. National pride was
instilled thru murals, folk festivals and museums in charge of the collection and
display of ethnographic artifacts and natural specimen like in the National Museum.

Cultural Center of the Philippines was the entity in charge of the

implementation of art acquisition, exhibition making, workshops, grants and awards.
Leandro Locsin, chief architect of Imelda Marcos designed this modernist building
as a cross between the bahay kubo and art minimalist structures. Other edifices built
during this period were the CCP Complex, Folk Arts Theater, PICC, Tahanang
Filipino, Manila Film Center. Most of the buildings used concrete block- like forms
suggestive of the Modern style while the others used vernacular elements as a way
of reviving Filipino traditions (Flaudetee May Datuin 2016).

Social Realism

This is the period of the 70s and 80s in which the art form was a protest art that
exposed the socio-political issues and struggles at this time. The focus was on the
oppressed, marginalized and underrepresented people who experienced inequality
and forms of repression. Art was not only expressed through painting but also
posters and murals in the streets. The Salingpusa, a group of UP students, who
became popular in the 80’s, made collaborative murals where Social Realism could
be felt. The members of this group are Elmer Borlongan, Karen Ocampo Flores,
Emmanuel Garibay, Mark Justiniani, Lito Mondejar, and Federico Sievert. There was
also a group of political artists in Bacolod named Pamilya Pintura whose members
were Nunelucio Alvarado, Charlie Co, and Norberto Roldan.

Some of the varied contemporary art forms of expressions were Ang Kiukok’s
dogfight paintings hinting of conflict and aggression, Santiago Bose’s ethnicity,
identity and alternative historical narratives who drew insight from his native Baguio,
Roberto Feleo’s creation stories drawn from indigenous myths with foreign
interventions like altar niches used to house saints, and Brenda Fajardo’s histories of
ethnic communities through her tarot card series. Another one is entitled Cutting
Onions Always Makes Me Cry, (1988) by Julie LLuch from Iligan city who would often
emphasize her female identity and personal experiences in many of her terracotta
works. Her self-portrait presents cooking, a role associated with women in the home
as oppressive and unpleasant. Nelia Querubin-Tompkins, a ceramist, has
experimented with iron-rich San Dionisio clay sourced from her native Iloilo. The
coarse clay is prepared by mixing it with river sand and lead glaze to create elegant
black pottery. Ricarte Purugganan depicted nature as an uncontrollable force in
Toilers of the Sea, 1980, the thick turquoise brushwork suggests the rough rolling of
the waves threatening to engulf anything that comes its way. Lirio Salvador, Cavite
based artist, fuses easily accessible objects like machine discards, bicycle parts,
and kitchen implements to form an assemblage. He would often include synthesizers
and guitar strings to convert these artworks into functional instruments. Benedicto
Cabrera, a National Artist, painted Brown Brother’s Burden,1970, approximates the
look of an old photograph which presents an aspect of colonial history from the gaze
of the colonized (Flaudetee May Datuin 2016).