Napoleon Abueva

Biography

He was given the name Napoleon at the age of six. A nun at Saint Joseph Academy in Tagbilaran named the boy after Bonaparte, and the nickname stuck. Later Abueva liked to repeat the emperor’s words: had he not been a conqueror, he would have wished to be a sculptor.

At birth, on 26 January 1930, he was named Esabelio, after his paternal grandmother’s younger sister. The family lived in Tagbilaran, on Bohol: his father, Teodoro Abueva, was the island’s congressman, and his mother, Purificación Veloso, headed the Women’s Auxiliary Service. There were seven children in the family. He finished high school in 1949 at Rafael Palma College (now the University of Bohol). According to some accounts, in 1943, during the Japanese occupation, his parents were seized and killed, and the fourteen-year-old himself was detained by soldiers and held for several days; I would check this against further documents before relying on it. In 1951 he received the Pura Villanueva-Kalaw scholarship and entered the School of Fine Arts of the University of the Philippines, where in 1953 he took his Bachelor of Fine Arts in sculpture. His class was the second to move from the old campus on Padre Faura to Diliman. His mentor was Guillermo Tolentino, also a future National Artist for Sculpture. Study abroad on scholarships followed: by some accounts a Fulbright programme and the University of Kansas, then a master’s degree at the Cranbrook Academy of Art in 1955, and in 1956 studies at Harvard.

His first prizes came even before the degree. In 1951 he won first prize at a sculpture exhibition of the Art Association of the Philippines. In 1953 his marble “Kaganapan” took the top prizes at another exhibition of the same association, and at an international competition held by the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London his work “The Unknown Political Prisoner” was recognised. The wooden “Kiss of Judas” won first prize at a religious art exhibition in Detroit in 1955, and the marble “Water Buffalo” was bought at the annual show in Saint Louis in 1956. In 1959 he received the Republic Award for Sculpture and was named one of the Ten Outstanding Young Men of the Philippines.

He tried almost every material: hardwoods, adobe, metal, stainless steel, cement, marble, bronze, iron, alabaster, coral, brass. Most of his bronzes were cast in Cebu by Franz Herbich, a German Filipino artist. He worked in both an academic manner and an abstract one.

Among his best-known works are the University of the Philippines gateway (the design won a competition in 1962, and the gateway has stood since 1967), “The Transfiguration” at Eternal Gardens Memorial Park (1979), “Nine Muses” at the university’s Faculty Center (1994), “Sunburst” at the Peninsula Manila hotel (1994), the bronze figure of Teodoro Kalaw in front of the National Library, and marble murals at the National Heroes Shrine on Mount Samat in Bataan. In Tagbilaran, in Barangay Bool, stands his “Sandugo” (Blood Compact), a monument to the first treaty of friendship between Spaniards and Filipinos. He also made the death masks of Fernando Poe Junior (2004) and Cardinal Sin; the 1983 death mask of Ninoy Aquino was made by his son Mulawin.

In 1962 he represented the country at the Century 21 Exposition in Seattle; in 1964 he was invited by the Arts Council in England and shown at the Venice Biennale; he then went as a delegate to the International Congress of Art in Tokyo (1966) and in Amsterdam (1969), and took part in the São Paulo Biennial and in the Philippine Pavilion at Expo 70 in Osaka. He was president of the Art Association of the Philippines in 1965–1966 and of the Philippine Sculptors’ Society in 1967–1968.

In 1976, by Proclamation No. 1539, Abueva was named National Artist for Sculpture. In 1987 he received an ASEAN award for visual arts in Bangkok, and in 1995 in Singapore the fourth ASEAN Achievement Award for Visual Arts.

In his last years he taught in the industrial design department of the School of Design and Arts at De La Salle–College of Saint Benilde. Abueva died on 16 February 2018 in Quezon City, aged eighty-eight, and was buried at the Libingan ng mga Bayani, the national heroes’ cemetery.