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.
He was an amazing draftsman. Like the Spanish painter Goya, he had a penchant for the symbolic, the lyrical, and the historical. He had an uplifted vision of humanity after having lived through the war. At the same time, he seemed to have a profound insight into the modern era. So he was one of those top-notch artists who married their humanism and their art. Yet, in his own country, he was underrated.
Vicente Dizon stood up, some would say, against the destructive forces lurking in modernism. He had great visual acuity combined with remarkable technical command, which enabled him to render his drawings and paintings with outstanding veracity. Surprisingly, despite his brilliant gifts, he declined to follow the trending fashions of art during his time. He could have acted as a stabilizing element in the turbulence of the Philippine Art scene after the influence of Fernando Amorsolo had waned. He could have exerted his influence on a new generation of Philippine painters. But his work left no imprint on Philippine painting on a scale that Victorio Edades, Carlos Francisco, Galo Ocampo, Diosdado Lorenzo, and Vicente Manansala did.
Dizon, however, impressed American and Filipino audiences wherever he lectured. Tall, articulate, and always sartorially elegant, he never failed to cut a figure when giving a lecture demonstration on art. When he was at Yale, for example, he would get invited to go on cross-country tours to lecture about Philippine Art and Culture. He accepted these with aplomb, and regaled awe-struck audiences with his watercolor paintings of Filipino costumes from 1500 to 1935.
In own country, he pioneered in Art Education at all educational levels. He would, for example, visit public and private schools in Manila, drawing an audience of young children by playing on a musical saw or on the ocarina. He would then give a chalk demonstration to complete the session. Schools, he believed, could become “instruments for raising public art consciousness” among Filipinos. He wanted Art Education to be included in the curriculum of public and private schools, even while he taught Drawing and Art Appreciation at the National Teachers’ College from 1929 to 1941. In 1932, he was elected executive secretary of the Philippine Association of Fine and Applied Arts and in 1946 he helped in the reorganization of the UP School of Fine Arts.
Sickness, curatorial neglect, and cultural obloquy would finally cut down this symbol of artistic integrity – among the rare talents that the Filipino race has produced.