What makes an artist belong to a country?
A passport might provide one answer. Birthplace and ancestry might provide others. But stand before the works of Juvenal Sansó and another possibility emerges: belonging can also be built slowly, through memory, landscape and a lifetime of looking.
That idea sits quietly at the heart of Sansó: Pusong Pilipino, a retrospective now on view at the National Museum of Fine Arts in Manila.
Nearly 100 works spanning more than seven decades bring visitors into the world of the Spanish-born painter and printmaker — a world in which the Philippines was never simply a place he happened to live. It became part of his visual language.
Sansó was born in Reus, Catalonia, Spain, in 1929, but arrived in the Philippines as a five-year-old after his family left Spain in 1934. Manila became the landscape of his childhood. He learned Tagalog, swam in the Pasig River and grew up in Paco at a time when the city was approaching one of the most devastating chapters of its history.
World War II would leave a permanent mark on him.
Sansó survived the Japanese occupation, suffered hearing loss after a bombing and saw his family home burn. Those experiences later surfaced in the dark, distorted figures of his early expressionist work — paintings far removed from the luminous tropical imagery traditionally associated with Philippine art.
Yet darkness was only one part of his vocabulary.
Over the decades, flowers, shorelines, rocks, vegetation and fishing structures began filling his compositions. Among the most revealing are his Baklad works, inspired by the woven bamboo fish traps found in Philippine coastal communities.
Years later, Sansó would become celebrated internationally for paintings of Brittany’s coast in France. But the visual fascination that appeared there had an intriguing Philippine antecedent: he had already been studying the geometry of fishing structures here.
It is one of the pleasures of seeing so much of his work gathered together. What can look like separate periods of an artist’s career begin speaking to one another.
An Artist Between Worlds
Sansó eventually studied in Europe, including in Rome and Paris, and built a career that extended far beyond Manila. But leaving the Philippines never quite meant departing from it.
He returned regularly, exhibited here and eventually chose the country for his retirement. In 2014, he established Fundacion Sansó with close friends. He died in Manila in March 2025 at the age of 95.
His relationship with the Philippines was therefore more complicated — and perhaps more interesting — than a simple question of nationality.
He was European by birth, internationally trained and culturally shaped by several places. Yet the Philippines gave him childhood memories, wartime trauma, artistic education and many of the forms that continued to surface in his work.
Even a painting such as Ati Atihan, created decades after the little Catalan boy first arrived in Manila, suggests how deeply local experience had entered his imagination.
The National Museum exhibition makes that relationship visible without reducing Sansó to a single identity.
Selected from more than 600 works, the show brings together early figurative pieces, paintings from his somber postwar period, the Baklad series, landscapes and seascapes, floral works, prints, collagraphs and later pieces from his Moderno series.
Rather than functioning merely as a timeline, the exhibition offers a chance to see how certain memories, textures and forms kept resurfacing across an extraordinarily long career.
From Private Walls to Public Memory
There is another reason the retrospective matters beyond the exhibition itself.
Its opening on August 26 was accompanied by the donation of six original Sansó works by Fundacion Sansó and private collectors to the National Museum of the Philippines.
Among them are Nicole from 1959, Flower Market and a print of Lueurs, a work whose other impressions are held by Yale University and the National Gallery of Art in Washington.
The shift is significant.
Art that once depended on private ownership for its preservation now becomes part of a public collection. Students can encounter it. Researchers can study it. Someone wandering into the museum simply looking for somewhere to spend an afternoon can discover it.
That may ultimately be the most fitting continuation of Sansó’s relationship with the country.
He arrived in the Philippines as a child from somewhere else. The country became part of the way he remembered, saw and eventually created. Now, decades later, some of those creations formally enter the nation’s cultural memory.
Pusong Pilipino could easily have become a sentimental title.
Seen through Sansó’s life and paintings, however, it poses a more interesting proposition: culture is not always something inherited at birth. Sometimes it is accumulated through places lived in, languages learned, histories endured, friendships formed and images carried for a lifetime.
And sometimes, after an artist spends decades painting a place into his work, that place eventually finds a permanent space for him, too.
Sansó: Pusong Pilipino is on view at Gallery XV, third floor of the National Museum of Fine Arts in Manila until February 28, 2027. Admission is free.