Front-row seat to Filipino art: The Alfredo Roces collection

It’s not often that one man has had a front-row seat to great art—and lived to tell the tale for all of us. Thanks to an extraordinary collection of books, drawings and sketches, paintings, photographs, and pottery, Alfredo “Ding” Roces has done just that.

Culture chronicler Isidra Reyes points out that he had a career that paralleled the twists and turns of Philippine modern art. She would describe him accurately as “the multi-hyphenate artist, writer, editor, historian, educator, book illustrator, photographer, and advertising man; and a living legend of Philippine art.”

It was not surprising for Roces, whose earliest recollection was of a grand Felix Resurreccion Hidalgo that hung at the top of the stairs of his home. Titled Artista y Modelo, it disappeared into the ages when the mansion burned to the ground in the Battle of Manila in 1945.

That painting may have been the metaphor for Roces’ own pursuits, looking for what was best in Philippine culture but also seeking what had been lost. He would write the landmark book, Felix Resurreccion Hidalgo and the Generation of 1872, as a sort of paean to that long-vanished masterpiece. It would be among the 15 works that illuminate his legacy.

The Roces family was the first to go full-on mass media in the Philippines with a chain of popular newspapers, called T-V-T, which stood for “Taliba, La Vanguardia, and The Tribune,” a three-language empire. The family also owned the Ideal Theater, billed as ‘the home of MGM films.” (Ding would cut his teeth in the distribution offices in New York as a student.)

As a result, Roces was that rare creature who could write and paint at the same time. He, in fact, wrote non-stop about Philippine art in a daily column from 1958 to 1972. He would design many touchstones that still remain with us today, including the iconic logo for Cultural Center of the Philippines. He would also produce the astonishing resource Filipino Heritage that would span 10 volumes. There were books on the neo-realist Cesar Legaspi and the modernist sensation Ang Kiukok.

Ding Roces also had the gift of camaraderie and he collected the works of his favorite artists relentlessly, plucked from each other’s lives as wonderful totems of a legendary era.

He was co-founder of the rightly famous “Saturday Group” which met each Saturday morning at the Taza de Oro coffeeshop on Roxas Boulevard. It attracted artists, gallerists, models, collectors, and the curious—and was an unstoppable art machine that included such greats as Hernando R. Ocampo and also the men we now know with a single name: Legapsi, Olazo, Nuyda, and Olmedo. There are the famous nude sketches and “Interactions,” or collaborations by several Saturday group members, as well as several covetable canvases from the Sixties, Seventies, and beyond.

Indeed, his collection of works, beginning with an Amorsolo-esque early Anita Magsaysay-Ho of a lad in a straw hat in 1934, spans 85 years of Filipino art and culture. It will be another “single-owner” auction for Leon Gallery which pioneered this art-phenomena with the Jim and Reed Pfeufer collection of Fernando Zobel works, as well as the collections of the 19th-century grandee Pedro Paterno, and most recently, scholar and numismatist Benito Legarda. The Alfredo and Irene Collection is scheduled for auction on Saturday, March 15, beginning at 2 p.m., with previews ongoing until that day.

The artworks speak volumes about an unseen life, beginning with an Onib Olmedo that captures some of the country’s greatest artists in a pre-game huddle as well as a collection of insects painted by butterfly enthusiast Justin Nuyda.

Befitting Roces’ own status as one of Philippine art’s greats, there are several show-stoppers, including an artwork titled Breakfast 1 by Ang Kiukok. It is a wonderful gray and gritty depiction of the Filipino repast that mimics the Biblical meal of loaves and fishes. (Alpha-collector Paulino Que called it a specimen from one of Ang’s rarest periods.)

Two HR Ocampos are marquee lots; any one of these would have illuminated any auction. The first is a portrait of Victor Oteyza, the genius behind the famous modernist series Plastic Engineering. Oteyza was one of the first Neo-Realists, the men who created the template for Philippine abstract art.

The second is Fifty-Three-J, an exquisite work that also happens to he highly documented as one of the glories of the Philippine Art Gallery at the dawn of the modern art movement and the gallery’s opening. It was part of HR Ocampo’s exhibition in 1953.

Roces also thrived on sculpture: he counted as one of his friends Eduardo Castrillo, but there is also an intense Danilo Dalena of a cop thrashing a protester. He also enjoyed tapestries and there is an Anita Magsaysay-Ho and a Cesar Legaspi.