VICENTE ALVAREZ DIZON, a prize-winning painter and lecturer in the 30’s and 40’s is today virtually unknown. Who was this Filipino artist, once so nationally prominent? A reader of this book might be justified in asking what caused his disappearance from the public scene.
Was it perhaps because he had no wealthy patron who could have sent him abroad for further art studies? Not so. After earning an Art Diploma from a 5-year course at the U.P. School of Fine Arts in 1928, he applied for and got accepted to a three-year post-graduate course at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, in the United States. This was in 1934. In the early 1930s and 1940s, Dizon belonged to an elite group of some of the best-trained art professionals.