Joya’s Abstract Expressionist Bravura
This untitled 1960 work comes from the same prolific period as (in fact, only a year after) the iconic "Space Transfiguration," Joya's beloved favorite and awardwinning piece (it won second prize at the 1959 AAP Annual). In 1960, when Joya produced the work at hand, he once again emerged victorious, winning the third prize for "Horse of Life" and the "Purchase Award" for "Church Silver."
The lot at hand captures the same dynamic bravado of Space Transfiguration's brush strokes. Here, we see Joya fully embracing his abstract expressionist identity rooted in his oriental sensibilities.
The onset of the 1950s is considered formative for Jose Joya's burgeoning artistry. In the early years of the decade, Joya graduated magna cum laude at the University of the Philippine School of Fine Arts, becoming the first student to achieve such distinction.
In 1954, he traveled to Europe armed with a scholarship at Madrid's Instituto Cultura Hispanica, where he only stayed for nine months. Afterward, Joya embarked on an artistic field trip, visiting museums in France, Germany, Switzerland, Austria, and England. His creative senses would be reawakened upon seeing the works of the great European masters. "You can just imagine the tremendous impact of all these works of art on someone like me who came from the other side of the globe," Joya said in a 1973 interview with Cid Reyes and published in the latter's Conversations on Philippine Art.
Joya was granted a Smith-Mundt-Fulbright scholarship grant to study his master's in fine arts at Michigan's Cranbrook Academy of Art. There, Joya encountered, for the first time, the dynamic impulse and vigorous strength of the Abstract Expressionist visual language that had been raging in the American art world, espoused by the likes of Pollock, de Kooning, Kline, Rothko, and Motherwell.
"In America, I got exposed to the New York School of Painting," Joya said to Cid Reyes in a September 1973 interview published in the latter's Conversations on Philippine Art. "From the American abstractionists, I learned spontaneity and energy, the dynamic approach to abstraction."
During his Cranbrook period, Joya produced his first abstract expressionist work, titled Poetry in Color, which Leonidas Benesa describes in the book Joya: Drawings as a work filled with "an explosion in color" and a "natural result of his experiences and experiments with gesture drawing, which fill[ed] up several sketch pads and sketchbooks."
It is the same creative and kinetic quality that can be seen in the work at hand. Characterized by a kinetic impulse so dynamic in technique, this particular piece stands as a singular testament to Joya's virtuoso that gives prominence to the unbridled gush of emotions rather than the rigidity of academicism to which he had previously been attuned to while in college.
It can be remembered that during his Cranbrook years, Joya discovered how a single twig soaked in ink and then calligraphed on paper can result in a gush of expressiveness rooted in harmony with nature. Like the old Chinese masters, this "liberated his imagination," as Benesa puts it. Joya's Oriental sensibilities—a sublime oneness with nature that pays reverence not only to its physical, realistic form but, moreover, its elements that come into play and the metaphysical energies that are dynamically captured in a single bravura of a calligraphic stroke—is perhaps his most important legacy to Philippine art, captured in this microcosm of his great art that is this 1960 piece.
One year after this 1960 work, Joya would be granted the most prestigious Republic Cultural Heritage Award, the precursor to the Order of National Artists. Joya's abstract expressionist virtuoso would climax at the 1964 Venice Biennale, the Philippines historic, first-ever participation at what is dubbed "The Olympics of the Art World." (Adrian Maranan)
Accompanied by a certificate issued by Josefa Joya-Baldovino confirming the authenticity of this lot
Provenance: León Gallery, The Spectacular Mid Year Auction 2018, Makati City, 9 June 2018, Lot 79.