Whenever World War II serves as a reference point of a conversation, I imagine such a period through the sonic register of disorder, disruption, and explosion, a city turned into ground zero. From the archives, moving images, cinema, and literature, Manila figures into the frames as a place where the legacies of Spanish and American architecture can be found, and eventually, with the dire turn of world events, the country diminishes into piles of rubble. 

Under the weight of this history, the wreckage brought by one of the most destructive wars in history ironically has become the nestling ground for artists like Anita Magsaysay-Ho and Nena Saguil. In the face of destruction, these artists seem to dwell on and imagine a visual survival and presence, and through such an achievement during the so-called interwar period, Patrick Flores pleasurably imagines this historical episode in Philippine art history by curating an exhibition, Material Inspirations: Anita Magsaysay-Ho and Nena Saguil, in the South Gallery at the Metropolitan Museum of Manila in the wealth enclave of BGC in November–December 2024. The show featured some of the scintillating works in which these artists make us marvel at the difficulty of their respective techniques, and I am endeared by the worldly dimensions of Anita’s folk women in the market places of Manila, as well as overwhelmed by Nena’s cosmic realm that she draws from her personal experiences.

I admire Flores for curating an artistic and visual kinship within a historical paradigm with which these two artists continue to be identified, but also suffer, especially with our awareness of and protestations against the temporal historical domain, a field perpetually defined and dominated by the hubris and gender privilege of machismo. Flores solidified the integral position of Anita and Nena in art history that is also made by the destruction and construction of wars by not situating them through the language or discourse of softness and femininity, which wars desperately seek and find solace from. By defying the logic of destruction, Flores granted these artists an affective presence of solidity, firmness, palpability, and flight, making them material to and at the same time a wellspring of beautiful inspirations. 

With the curatorial characterization of the artistic contributions of Anita and Nena, unbeknownst perhaps to most, as these artists prevail eventually through the times, their material inspirations do not settle in the complacency afforded by the here and now. They are also returning to Manila’s museum spaces after so long, for they have laid the temporal connection between the past and future, showing that the war against the likes of them has continued, and that despite such a predicament, their works continue to be the breathing grounds in a Foucauldian imagination of reality where peace has unfortunately been warped into a coded war, which makes the war at the turn of the 20th century a ruefully continuing one. 

Modern art

Beyond recognizing that war serves as the horizon of such a historic period, I also speak of war to foreground Anita’s and Nena’s works, for such a social condition constitutes modern art, which, in fact, has been also at war with women. I am elated to draw from Katy Hessel who wishes to finally reverse the order of things by drawing from Diane Radycki, who argues that the “participation of women artists” is always the answer to the proverbial question: What makes modern art modern? 

Despite the participation of women artists in the face of nonrecognition, for Hessel, such a history has led them to “turn their gaze onto themselves, claimed spaces of their own…embraced sexual freedoms, and looking to the outside world, expressed how they saw this as they never had before.” Hessel’s perspective on modern art in the absence of men shows that women, at one point, have created a condition for the female gender to thrive without begging men to grant their aspirations and wishes, and much so, in their invisible community, they celebrate their bodies, making them live in a space—to paraphrase Virginia Woolf, a studio of their own. 

However, in celebrating the freedom of female sexuality, modern art should not be seen as unilaterally experienced. Perhaps, in the context of the Philippines as seen in the experiences of Anita and Nena, the act of women where they explore their interiority emerges as they train the spotlight to the laboring folk women found in the public sphere, and in such visibility, the courage to do so may be brought by the abyssal nature of their mind to be decisive in such action, which brings them to depths of their cosmic consciousness that artists like them have fully articulated and visualized in the open. 

As these two female artists commit themselves to their respective techniques while allowing themselves to be exhibited in public, they are both called to perform a devotion. I understand devotion as the very nature of commitment and their passion for techniques despite the difficulty or health hazards of their work. Anita, for instance, is called forth by the technique of egg tempera to prohibit herself from committing an error because of the quick-hardening character of the material. As for Nena, she endures the bodily strain enabled by the meticulous and detailed artistic process of pointillism aesthetics. By viewing their art practice as also a test of bodily stamina, I want to present the same position of feminists in looking at modern art, where they imagine the disappearance of machismo in art history as they celebrate women’s independence whenever women dive into the challenges of their art, the difficulty and humbleness of their technique, and also the obscurity of their subjects, especially as they emerge from situations where they are born to be made to succumb to their gender stereotype as the second sex. Having been turned into subjects of gender indoctrination, they are forced to appear as though agents for domestic peace, bearers of feminine qualities, and living decorative pieces. 

In the process of resisting such expectations, women have shown modern art as a tenacious social and artistic existence. In looking at the significant yet humble interventions of the two, the history of modern art should not be viewed also as a historic period that has finally reached the end of its history, and its traditional definition can declare its victory. The appearance of these women in this period of art history must be a reminder that the war of women artists is still on.

Histories of pain

Since war has reached a degree of permanence, Hélène Cixous, at one point, philosophically reflects by exposing such feelings provoked by paintings as also comparable to histories of pain. As the paintings generate sensorial feelings of grief, difficulty, and suffering, our emotions show how history can extend its reach with scope and latitude.

It can be seen in Anita’s Talipapa / In the Marketplace in which women’s faces appear to be chiseled and angular, capturing the intensity of their conversations and business transactions; each of these women seems to speak with conviction and certitude, a defiance against the stereotype of the feminine. In another work, Mga Tagapagluto / Cooks, apart from defying the stereotype of women, the extensive bodily characterization of women within the agrarian landscape turns their supposed domestic domain such as the kitchen into a place within the heart of men’s harvest period, while being surrounded by the play of shadow that makes the cooks’ presence the source of light. This work captures how Anita tempers the tendency to depict such figures by regressing into a romance when it comes to the world of the folk. 

But if Anita paints the world by capturing the zeitgeist from the grassroots, Nena takes off from the ground and seeks a flight to the sky, clouds, or heavens, as in her Illumination Triptych No. 1, 2 and 3. These three pen-and-ink works illustrate the presence of stairs, marking an upward pathway while curtain-like layers of curved and round circular patterns hover, made visible through the repetition, density, and volume of dots, shades, and lines. As the works juxtapose the stairway with the clouds, the triptych envisions that ascending to such a cosmic realm can be infinite. At the same time, the works gesture us to intuit the perspective where the process of traversing the spheres above can only happen by coming full circle—but unfortunately, in as much as we reach for the heavens, these dots, points, and shades also evoke how such spheres will never be finite, and the promise of finally stepping onto the last destination that can be the paradisiacal heaven might not ever be achievable. 

The extending limbs of Anita under Nena’s elusive stratosphere also show that the pains of paintings will always be the potential of incompleteness as their works meet tangentially only to diverge. 

Nonlinearity

The poignancy that engulfs the works and lives of Anita and Nena also shows that their redemption is a history where women in Philippine art history are found will always be nonlinear. The absence of linearity gives presence to vibration, rhythm, and flow. I recognize such sensorial experiences as these two artists describe their subjectivity whenever they allow themselves to be immersed in their respective techniques. Anita shares her feelings as she performs her technique that appears in the citation found in the wall texts written by Flores for the exhibition: “Working on egg tempera was absorbing. You become totally engrossed in the process. You lose yourself while working. Time does not exist.” 

Despite the seeming intensity and very cubist presence of the folk women in Anita’s paintings, she also transforms the elongated and sharp contours of their facial presence by making these into a moment of allowing their embodiment and becoming to distend, reconstituting the presence of time as a process of stretching the possibilities, and simultaneously, a process of deferring their end, which finally makes the linear as always stereotypically an end of history into a line where the growth, the expansion, and the push are suddenly all slithering out. 

Nena, on the other hand, reverses Anita by expressing how she “must be sure of every line and every dot—just as a writer must be sure of correct grammar and punctuation in what [she] has written. …When I’ve been working continuously in black and white, it affects the way I look at the outside world. When I look at people and things, I see them in terms of the black and white work I’m doing.” Nena’s account of her practice retools how I traditionally perceive circulars, dots, or cellulars as shapes that will evoke a merely wayward perspective. Surprisingly, she reverses such a stereotype when it comes to circular shapes and geometric figures by making me sensitive to the formation of such shapes, and at the same time, the very method that endures pressure, depth, and repetition of persistence. 

In achieving depth for such shapes or dimensions, Nena in the certitude of her technique may be informed by an idea about historical time as nonlinear as well, and such historicity bears on her practice for it unfolds the circular, spherical, and even cell-like as traced, felt, and seen around the intimacy between return and repetition. In the process of repeating the method, Nena also returns to the variation of lines, which simulates the signifying presence of circular through the arbitrary presences of dots, shades, and smudges, while being animated and made dynamic through the synergy of color, ink, pen, and paint. 

Double mirror

Beneath the two artists’ alternating relations is the war of the times that insists on a singular dominance of an entity or force, which also repeatedly fails, from being the first and then the second world war. Despite the catastrophes that war only offers, such paradigms insist on tracing the sovereign sky and coloring the horizon above the women like them who labor as artists. 

Through the visibility of Anita and Nena, such a historical period positions them to repel expectations as they show a double mirror in which women artists like them do not seek to pontificate. Within their limited spaces, they reverse, replicate, repeat, or double one another, which makes Nena’s dots also the opening for Anita’s angular faces. Every angular chiseled face of a person begins with a point. 

Anita and Nena evolve as two artists who also serve as the thresholds that open through one another, which makes our material inspirations intersect, and at the same time, they get entangled with one another. Right at the crossroads where they meet, this exhibition makes sisterhood not an artistic kinship that engenders uniformity or forced similarity. The kinship that has been normatively viewed as an attachment becomes a variation, divergence, and meeting point that eventually reaches a path of flight where they both persist and transcend. 

In their efforts to take off as bodies burdened to carry the weight of the warring world, one might imagine that they have achieved milestones in art through the sheer strength they have been privileged to muster. Yet such inspirations move us: As we look upward, a glass ceiling unfortunately continues to provide a roof for all of us. 

Jose Mari Cuartero recently served as the research associate for the upcoming Philippine Pavilion, Soil-beings / Lamánlupa, at the 19th International Architecture Exhibition of the Biennale Architettura 2025, under curator Renan Laru-an and artist Christian Tenefrancia Illi.