Philippine art scene’s foremost women artists, Anita Magsaysay-Ho and Nena Saguil, featured at the Metropolitan Museum of Manila

Magsaysay-Ho continued her studies at the Art Students’ League in New York, concentrating on oil painting, graphics and figure sketching. At Cranbrook Academy of Art in Michigan, she learnt to use egg tempera from the renowned artist Zoltan Zepeshy. This medium required her to dilute two egg yolks with water and drain them in cheesecloth. The binding agent was then combined with ground powdered pigments.

“Oh, it’s such a tedious process… It’s such a beautiful medium, but you have to have the patience for it. It’s very, very luminous because of the egg yolk, and you get this quality find only in old Italian paintings,” Magsasay-Ho shared in an interview with art critic Cid Reyes.

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If Magsaysay-Ho was celebrated for her post-impressionist, almost cubist works referencing regional elements, Saguil’s triumph in Paris was echoed throughout the Philippines for her focus on non-objective abstractions. To highlight her distinctiveness, Flores dedicated a section of the exhibition to her laborious and philosophically profound pen-and-ink works.

In 1954, Saguil went to Europe on a scholarship from the Walter Damrosch organisation. She studied at the Institute of Spanish Culture in Madrid and, later, at the Ecole d’Art Américaines at the Château de Fontainebleau and the Académie de la Grande Chaumière in Paris. Her first solo exhibition was held there in 1955 at Galerie Raymond Creuze.

Saguil found pen-and-ink even more complicated among other mediums, as she explained to Reyes in a separate interview.

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“I 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… Pen-and-ink is more complicated because it is very detailed work that affects how I look at the outside world,” Saguil shared.

The M’s 2024 exhibition, which coincided with the artists’ 100th birth anniversary, examined their obsession with their craft, what they valued in life and the dignity of labour. “Because you cannot rush these artworks, and they cannot be easily forged because of the artists’ idiosyncrasies,” explained Flores.

Historian Ambeth Ocampo, who shared his encounters with Magsaysay-Ho and Saguil in their later years, agrees that both artists were devoted to their craft.

“Anita lived a privileged life in different countries. Nena had an austere and almost monastic life in Paris. This suggests that one need not romanticise the dedication of the ‘poor struggling artist’ nor one who chooses to live a Spartan life for their art,” Ocampo said.

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Ocampo met Magsaysay-Ho through her daughter Doris and would see her at social gatherings but has yet to have the chance to talk to her extensively.“I showed her an unsigned painting I inherited as a gift from my father,” Ocampo recalled. “She was happy to see it and took it back to her studio to sign it properly with paint; that’s how I was able to chat with her in her studio in 2004 and watch her at work on a late egg tempera piece. One of my biggest regrets was not spending an afternoon sitting to be drawn by Anita as we convened.

Later, in 2006, former President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo conferred Magsaysay-Ho and Saguil the Presidential Medal of Merit.

“I met Nena in the mid-Eighties in Paris. We corresponded a lot because she wanted me to curate her retrospective at the [old location of the] Metropolitan Museum. But this was disrupted by the 1986 snap elections and People Power,” Ocampo said.

In Saguil’s apartment, Ocampo was baffled by the number of her works. Her signature dots and circular figurations would fill up every space—“except only for the telephone”.

“When I asked Nena why she never married, she answered: ‘If I am alone, I am whole. If I am married, I am half,’” recalled Ocampo.

The two artists would later reunite, albeit spiritually, at the Venice Biennale 2024, through an exhibition of their works in the Central Pavilion.

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“Both could not be nominated to National Artist because of their citizenship,” clarified Ocampo. “If you look at the National Artists for the Visual Arts, you will note that they are all male. Two women who deserve to be on that list were Anita and Nena.”

However, Flores explained that this exhibition hopes to help art historians in their methodology. Focusing on the artists’ material inspirations, we can appreciate their explorations of “the existing opportunities in art” amidst a patriarchal art scene.

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