Geronimo Cristobal

Year: 2026

  • Women Pioneers of Philippine Art

    —

    by

    admin
    in , , ,

    In celebration of International Women’s Day, allow me to introduce three pioneering and remarkable women in Philippine Art. By the late 19th century, women began carving their place in formal art education led by the trailblazing Pelagia Mendoza y Gotianquin (1867-1939). Born in Pateros, Mendoza grew up demonstrating exceptional talent in artistic pursuits such as…

  • Lozano’s Letras y Figuras in the FDR Museum for Mapping Philippine Material Culture (SOAS)

    —

    by

    admin
    in , ,

    While researching visual representations of port cities, I encountered an unexpected object at the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum: a nineteenth-century letras y figuras painting by the Manila artist José Honorato Lozano (1815/1821–1885). The Roosevelt Library—best known for presidential papers, wartime correspondence, and family memorabilia—is not the first place art historians would think…

  • A Filipino painter you should know: Eduardo Arandia Salgado

    —

    by

    admin
    in , , ,

    The following article expands the original posted here: https://libguides.nybg.org/c.php?g=1465030 Eduardo Arandia Salgado (1910–1987) was a Filipino painter and botanical illustrator born in Manila. He studied painting at the University of the Philippines, completing advanced courses between 1931 and 1932 under the direction of Fabian de la Rosa and Fernando Amorsolo. Trained in a classical style,…

  • Antonio Garcia Llamas (1912–1999)

    —

    by

    admin
    in , , , ,

    Antonio Garcia y Llamas (1912–1999) was a Filipino painter, muralist, and teacher who worked between Manila, Jakarta, and Madrid. Little is written about Garcia but his work aligns with the Philippine academic tradition in twentieth-century Philippine painting. He was born in Manila on 16 May 1912 and received his early education at the Colegio de…

  • Talismanic Case with Qurʾanic Prayer Scroll (Iran, 19th Century)

    —

    by

    admin
    in ,

    This nineteenth-century Iranian amulet consists of a metal case and a tightly rolled Qurʾānic prayer scroll preserved inside it (National Museum of Asian Art, Accession S2018.6a–c). The container, made of silver plated over a copper alloy, measures approximately 1.9 × 7.6 × 1.5 cm and has a six-sided body with rounded ends. One end opens…

  • Intellectual and Social Currents in the Establishment of the Academia de Dibujo y Pintura (1821–1834) published in Sojourn

    —

    by

    admin
    in , ,

    I’m pleased to announce the publication of my article in Sojourn: Journal of Social Issues in Southeast Asia: Geronimo Cristobal, “Intellectual and Social Currents in the Establishment of the Academia de Dibujo y Pintura (1821–1834),” Sojourn: Journal of Social Issues in Southeast Asia 41, no. 1 (2026): 1–45.https://doi.org/10.1355/sj41-1a The article revisits the origins of the…

  • Jacques Derrida’s La vérité en peinture (Flammarion 1978)

    —

    by

    admin
    in , , ,

    Jacques Derrida’s La vérité en peinture (The Truth in Painting), published by Flammarion in 1978, gathers a set of essays that rethink the relation between philosophy and the visual arts. The title, borrowed from a remark by Paul Cézanne, signals the provocation at the heart of the book: if painting is said to bear or…

  • Metro Romance (dir. Taylor Wong, 1984)

    —

    by

    admin
    in

    Carlotta Films is slated to re-release Behind the Yellow Line (1984) on Blu-ray under the title Metro Romance in April 2026. Directed by Taylor Wong, the film (originally titled 緣份, Yuan Fen, “Fate”) is a light romantic comedy set on Hong Kong’s newly modernized MTR. The new edition restores a modest but revealing mid-1980s hit.…

  • Isabelo de los Reyes’s Las Islas Visayas

    —

    by

    admin
    in , ,

    Isabelo de los Reyes was born on July 7, 1864 in Vigan, Ilocos Sur, the son of the Ilocana poet Leona Florentino. He was raised for a time under the care of his uncle, a lawyer and member of Ilocos’ literary circle. At sixteen, without his uncle’s consent, he left for Manila. He studied at…

  • EXPOLIARIVM: The Expatriate life of Juan Luna’s famous painting

    —

    by

    admin
    in , , , ,

    In 1884, at the Madrid Exposición General de Bellas Artes, a photograph by Juan Laurent captured Juan Luna’s Spoliarium installed alongside other works exhibited within a cavernous steel and glass hall. The image preserves the exhibitionary context that contributed to consolidating the painting’s public and international reputation. While scanning the Biblioteca Nacional de España’s archive,…

  • Vicente Rafael, Historian, 70

    —

    by

    admin
    in

    Vicente L. Rafael (February 16, 1956 – February 21, 2026) was a pioneering historian of the Philippines whose work transformed the study of colonialism and political power. A longtime professor of History and Southeast Asian Studies at the University of Washington, Rafael reshaped Philippine historiography by demonstrating how empire operates through language and the fraught…

  • Bonifacio’s Talisman

    —

    by

    admin
    in , ,

    Andrés Bonifacio (1863–1897) was a Filipino revolutionary leader and founder of the Katipunan, the secret society that launched the 1896 uprising against Spanish colonial rule. Often called the “Father of the Philippine Revolution,” Bonifacio emerged from modest urban circumstances in Tondo, Manila, and rose to prominence through his ability to mobilise working-class supporters. Unlike later…

  • Manila Beans in a Medici Recipe Book

    —

    by

    admin
    in , , ,

    When I visited Florence over the summer, I was surprised by how many Filipinos I met. Some were priests. Others ran restaurants or worked as artists. Hearing Tagalog in Tuscan streets made me think about older connections between Manila and Europe. I began wondering how Manila was imagined by the rest of the world during…

  • Museum installation focuses on small figures in large landscapes

    —

    by

    admin
    in , ,

    I wrote about staffage in vues d’optique—a genre of etching popular in the second half of the eighteenth century—for a new exhibition at the Johnson Museum. I first encountered these prints during my research fellowship in Leiden and was struck to learn that, around the same time, the Johnson received a donation of a set…

  • The Chapel in the Six Circuits of Hell

    —

    by

    admin
    in , , ,

    In his Kapilya installation for Art Fair Philippines, Max Balatbat assembles a makeshift chapel of salvaged wood and rusted rebar. This is supposed to represent the look of faith forged from marginal lives that the art writer Carla Gamalinda has compared to the one studied by Rey Ileto’s Pasyon at Revolution. A pendulum whip swings…

  • Modernist Morophilia

    —

    by

    admin
    in , ,

    Thank you to my colleagues at the Ateneo, especially Charlie Samuya Veric, for making this possible. This lecture on January 19 2026 will be inside Ateneo Katipunan Campus at the NGF Conference Room, located on the ground floor of Horacio De La Costa Hall. During my dissertation research, I came to see how many of…