1953 / Oil on canvas / 24 x 31.75 cm / Artist: Martino Abellana / Romulo Galicano collection

Martino Abellana is the Cebuano master who nurtured the development of a generation of Cebuano artists. Job Was Also Man won first prize in the conservative category at the 1953 semiannual competition of the Art Association of the Philippines. From the subject itself, this work reflects the social conditions of the postwar period.

Here Job, the biblical archetype of patience and long suffering, assumes the figure of a contemporary beggar clad only in shorts against a background of ruined buildings. The expressive face lined with suffering, its resigned eyes and mouth open in humble supplication, and the nude brown torso and limbs, with their strained sinews, show Abellana’s academic mastery of the human figure. The artist enhances the muscle and bone structure of the torso and slightly exaggerates the hands and feet to convey the sense of the beggar’s essential humanity as victim of the war waged by the world powers.

The sky in the background is a dark blue modulating to lighter tones in the horizon, but with smoke hanging in the air and the suggestion of a burning city in the distance. The composition itself is diamond shaped, the figure’s legs supported by a V-shaped base, which is repeated in the lines of the ruined stone building behind him. The figure symbolizes the condition of Filipinos at the end of the war.