Detail No.1
signed and dated 1953 (lower right)
watercolor on paper
17 3/4” x 12 1/4” (45 cm x 31 cm)

Provenance:
Private Collection, Makati City

Carlos Botong Francisco was a most distinguished practitioner of mural painting for many decades and best known for his historical pieces. The themes of the country’s foremost mural painter revolved aroud the communal man rooted in the soil, and the folk traditions of his ancestors. He institutionalized not only Christian lowlanders but also the Muslims and the cultural minorities.

Francisco’s first important murals were done in 1953. This watercolor, inscribed "detail # 1" is the study of one of two sections of the four panel “Progress of Medicine," one of his important murals of 1953, second to the now dismantled and carelessly disposed “Five Hundred Years of Philippine History,” the mural for the International Fair held in Manila. (It’s scope covered the legendary origin of the Filipino with the first man and woman Malakas at Maganda, up to the administration of the then president Elpidio Quirino. Foreign visitors to the fair were impressed by Botong Francisco’s “Five Hundred Years of Philippine History” mural which received two color spreads in the February 9, 1953 issue of Newsweek, but local appreciation was, apparently, lukewarm since it was promptly dismantled and carelessly disposed of after the fair.)

Fate was far kinder to “Progress of Medicine," which for the longest time was in the Philippine General Hospital. This watercolour on paper study for “Progress of Medicine” from 1953 is almost like a study for a scene from a Manuel Conde costume movie of the same era. Characteristic of Botong’s indigenous characters drawn from mythology, history, and legend, are how his sinuously curvaceous women contrast sharply with the powerfully chiselled physical features of the men. Carlos Botong Francisco's art has been described as " a prime example of linear painting where lines and contours appear like cutouts.”

In his quest for a Filipino modernist idiom, Francisco studied Filipino folk aesthetics and researched Filipino history, customs, and traditions. He arrived at an idiom which was both Filipino and Asian in the fresh colors of the folk, the flowing, and the curvilinear rhythms creating decorative patterns. This work also reflects Carlos "Botong" Francisco’s deft hand as a comics illustrator, even for the iconic Pinoy Komiks, illustrating the Tagalog classic Siete Infantes de Lara in 1948.