Portrait Of The Artist As Filipino Analysis

A Review of Portrait of the Artist as Filipino
Nick Joaquin’s A Portrait of the Artist as Filipino engages the reader, or the viewer, in the lives of its characters in the old, pre-World War II Manila, exposing their pride and struggle for identity. It displays the clash of the past and the present, how the youth buries the history, culture, and art that the old are trying to preserve. Another conflict is that between Art and Reality, how art dies in those who submit to conformity, and how the artist dies in a society that forgets him. The play lives up to its title, presenting the lives of different artists in a dying city, with the threat of war looming overhead. The characters and the plot focus on the painting of Don Lorenzo Marasigan, the painting that his daughters, Paula and Candida, are trying to preserve while his two older children, Manolo and Pepang, do what they can to get rid of it along with the entire house. Society presents itself in the reactions of the characters to Portrait. Most of them, especially the young ones, feel negative emotions toward the painting. Cora exposes this as fear, she says that they are afraid of the portrait because it is a work of art, and it makes them feel “very bogus and very impotent”. This idea, that people feel displeasure towards art because it makes them feel inferior, is human and reasonable since people truly loathe things that make them insecure. Other than the emotions of the society, the effects of the painting to