Biggest show of Lunas, Hidalgos, Amorsolos goes to Iloilo

MANILA, Philippines — The biggest exhibition of priceless Luna, Hidalgo and Amorsolo masterpieces, the first-ever outside of Metro Manila, opened recently in Iloilo City at the UP Visayas Museum of Art and Cultural Heritage.

Admission is free and the museum will be open through the Dinagyang Festival weekend, on Jan. 25 and 26.

Aptly titled “The Patrimony of All,” the show brings to the public eye a whopping 16 treasures from the Lopez Museum and Library Collection. It will be a rare glimpse of artworks usually safeguarded in private storage since the institution moved to a temporary facility seven years ago while it awaits the completion of its new headquarters. It is also the first time in the last several decades — anywhere in the Philippines — that so many of the Lopez old masters can be viewed in a single space.

This huge project took five years to put together, a public and private endeavor that was the brainchild of former senator Franklin Drilon.  A tripartite agreement involving Iloilo City, led by Mayor Jerry Treñas; UP Visayas, represented by  Chancellor Clement Camposano and the Lopez Museum, represented by Cedy Lopez-Vargas, was reached with additional funding coming from the office of Sen. Loren Legarda. Patrick Flores was selected as curator while Narzalina Lim, a trustee of the Lopez Foundation, quarterbacked the project with UP Visayas museum director Martin Genopeda.

A P5-million budget was set for this undertaking including insurance, security, 24/7 air-conditioning, and specially designed, state-of-the-art picture frames to control the micro-climate for each work.

The titular phrase “patrimony of all” comes from Jose Rizal’s famous toast to Juan Luna and Felix Resurreccion Hidalgo upon their winning the gold and silver medals in Madrid in 1884 — and which declared that, like Luna and Hidalgo, all Filipinos are capable of genius.

The show thus opens with canvases from both 19th-century icons.

Four canvases by Juan Luna include the “Ensueños de Amor (Dreams of Love)” which is thought to be a portrait of his wife Paz Pardo de Tavera asleep on their honeymoon and “Street Flower-Vendors” of Parisian women selling bouquets for the funeral of the French novelist Victor Hugo who wrote “Les Miserables.” Two other works portray women picking fruit or lost in thought.

The Lunas are matched by four equally important artworks by Felix Resurreccion Hidalgo. These include the last-surviving studies for his epic “El Asesinato del Gobernador Bustamante (The Assassination of Gov. Bustamante),” the award-winning “La Barca de Aqueronte (Boat to Hades)” and “Per Pacem et Libertatem (Through Peace and Liberty),” the final work of which was destroyed in the Battle of Manila in 1945.

Five works from Fernando Amorsolo, the country’s first National Artist for painting, span his golden period of the 30s, the war years, and the prosperous Philippine mid-century.

Juan Arellano, who was as much a painter as he was an architect, is likewise represented by several landscapes. The exhibit, incidentally, takes place at the Old Iloilo City Hall (now UP Visayas), an art deco marvel designed by Arellano and decorated with sculptures by Francesco Monti, in the same sleekly elegant style created by the tandem for the Metropolitan Theater of Manila.