Sanso danced in the moonlight
Though he so yearned to be a Filipino citizen & National Artist
Sanso, who passed away last week at the age of 95, basked in the sunlight and danced in the moonlight, so to speak. In most of the renowned artist’s works shines an incandescent moon, perhaps an expression of his belief in the triumph of light even in the darkest of moments.
“I give my good disposition to my paintings,” he told me when he had just turned 80, and we had a chat in his Bel-Air home.
At the time, he was looking forward to finally being a Filipino citizen since first setting foot on Philippine soil when he was four years old — after sailing 30 days from Spain, where he was born. Unfortunately, certain circumstances made it an impossible dream.
Hope, like the moon, also beamed from his Pinoy heart that he would one day be named National Artist. “Who doesn’t dream of that?” the candid Amorsolo-trained Sanso said. But since he was not a Filipino citizen, that, too, remained elusive.
But the Republic of the Philippines honored him with the Presidential Medal of Merit in 2006.
“I am happy now, and I hope my works show it, too, but when I had something to say from my aching guts during World War II, my works showed the pain, too. I have blue eyes, the Japanese thought I was American...anong malay nila?” he said, grimacing. It was 2009. The memories always shook him up, like the war “was just yesterday.”
But the Sanso I saw at 80 was a happy man.
***
After World War II, the battle-scarred Sanso family moved on with their lives, for they sailed half the world from Barcelona to start a new life in the Philippines. While on the ship, his father Jose decreed that Juvenal and his sister learn the language and customs of their adopted homeland — so Sanso punctuated most of his sentences with Pinoy expressions.
Sanso told me that when he was broke in Europe, he would say, “Awan ti kuwarta.” He recalled that once, at a curio shop in New York, a Filipino couple beside him laughed to themselves, “Ano kaya ang binibili ni Lolo?”unaware that the blonde blue-eyed man beside them was laughing inside.
Sanso, named “Juvenal” after the Roman writer, was grateful that his father, who had established Arte Español in Manila, a renowned wrought-iron and design business, required him to learn how to draw.
“That was the most magical moment in my life — when I learned how to draw,” reminisced Sanso. His first tutor was another Amorsolo-trained artist, Alejandro Celis. Eventually Sanso enrolled at the UP College of Fine Arts, but he was no (wrought) iron man. He never got into the family business.
Sanso then asked his father’s permission to study abroad. His father agreed. He didn’t Italian or French but proceeded to Rome to take up higher courses at the Accademia di Belle Arti and a year later, to Paris, where he enrolled at the L’Ecole Nationale Superieure des Beaux-Arts. He made do with his father’s $150 monthly stipend in Europe, where he almost died of measles at age 24.
He was to spend the next five decades of his life shuttling between Manila and Paris. Sanso held his first one-man show in Paris, then came home in 1957. He received the Distinguished King’s Cross of Isabela by King Juan Carlos I of Spain in 2007, and the conferment of the Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the Republic of France in 2008.
***
I asked Sanso when I visited him 15 years ago in his home, which was also home to about a dozen stray cats (once he had a total of 27 cats!), why he wasn’t a Filipino citizen yet despite the fact that he had spent virtually his entire life in the archipelago.
“It was very hard to become a Filipino citizen then. I couldn’t have left the country before I was 21. I had a chance to get citizenship during the Marcos administration, but I trusted someone to help me get it by presidential decree. That person said, ‘Have your peers recommend you to Mrs. Marcos. Give me a letter to Mrs. Marcos and she will give it to the President.’ The person supposed to deliver the letter to Mrs. Marcos reportedly never did,” claimed Sanso. “I couldn’t go on knocking on doors so I (temporarily) gave up.”
He never married, though he loved children.
“But if I told you maybe I have thousands of children you won’t believe me, but maybe I do,” he said. I thought he was referring to his works, but Sanso was dead serious when he said, “Children.”
He revealed that, when he was in his twenties, he donated four or five times to a sperm bank in Paris because he was told by some doctors there, “You donate blood, why not sperm? There are many childless couples who are desperate.” He told me he never met any of his “children” and did not yearn to do so.
Did painting bestow good health and a good disposition on him?
“Maybe it’s the other way around,” answered the octogenarian. “It works both ways. I give my good disposition to my paintings.”
“Sanso is a result of all his paintings and his paintings are the result of Sanso,” he added. “I do not paint for money, but for self-expression. However, I do have bills to pay.”
Public relations guru Jingjing Romero, who arranged many press interviews for Sansó, remembers him as a “gentle and kind person, warm and friendly, once he feels comfortable with you.”
Sanso’s good friend columnist Pepper Teehankee says the artist was, “A very generous one. He’d often ask me for lunch out and most often than not, he’d give me a small painting after the meal when I drop him home and we’d continue to chat there...he loved cracking jokes too when we weren’t talking about art and travel.”
So what was Sanso’s 80th birthday wish? “To live another 80 years!” he said without hesitation.
Sanso lived another 15. It was a gift for a truly gifted man. *
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