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Friday, January 17, 2025
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Friday, January 17, 2025

Pop art and the Catholic visual culture

Estimated reading time: 3 minutes and 20 seconds
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Ade Bethune elevates comicsas divine narration

Art history states that pop art gained prominence in the United States in the mid-1950s. The Philippines may be considered an early adapter to this art movement that uses the vernacular, the standard, popular visual language informed by everyday products like cinema and the grocery store. 

Belgian-American artist  Ade Bethune  introduced pop art to the Philippines before it became a more studied movement in the U.S. Her works are featured at the Chapel of St. Joseph the Worker in Victorias, Negros Occidental, where she helped decorate Asia’s first modern church. Bethune’s use of clear, graphic language in illustrating saints for the  Catholic Worker  magazine reflects her progressive, modern approach.

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Initially considering frescoes, Bethune shifted to mosaics due to the Philippine climate. She worked with the local community, seeing art as an act of mercy and a form of preaching. Her letters in the Ade Bethune Collection at the University of St. Catherine’s Library recount how even children contributed broken glass and china. This collaborative effort embodies Bethune’s version of  pakikisama, or being with the community, as she and the children created colorful mosaics of saints and the Holy Family depicted as Filipinos.

With her  pakikisama, Bethune has made some sharp observations about the Filipinos. In one of her letters, she writes that Filipinos seek leaders but not to be bossed around. “People are very ready to follow leadership, not mere bossing. They use the technique of passive resistance to any bossing; having been bossed for four centuries, they know better than to resist it openly. They merely obey it without co-operation, sort of potato sack style. Nothing more deadly (6 January 1950, Ade Bethune Collection).” 

Bethune wrote about this “passive resistance” even before the scholar  James Scott  wrote his  Weapons of the Weak  in 1985. This resistance allowed Bethune to select the Filipino as her depiction of the Apostles and the Holy Family.

Part of her “Works of Mercy” is to make the images resonate and be relevant. She does not subscribe to the traditional Catholic visual culture of florid, resplendent, ornate white saints in dramatic poses. This approach helps create a direct connection with the people who need to see themselves as potential figures of veneration; they can become saints if they engage in faith and labor for the glory of God.

For Bethune, the use of pop art is her engagement with comic aesthetics to tell stories. In one part of the Church, there is a comic strip painted on the wall that tells the sequential narrative of the Prodigal Son. The gambling scene is depicted as a cockfight or  sabong, which many Filipinos, not just in Victorias, are known to participate in and lose themselves in. The jubilant return scene takes place at a town fiesta with a  lechon. Bethune made this parable distinctly Filipino to speak directly to Filipinos, allowing them to see themselves in the comic strip mural.

Comic-type paintings of the parable ‘The Prodigal Son’ created by Negrense artisans

Even her mosaics of the Last Supper and Pentecost follow the comic strip format, with lateral beams resembling gutters or spaces between comic panels that guide the visual sequential narrative. The Last Supper features a beardless Christ who looks Filipino, standing among the Apostles, dressed in the simple shirts worn by the plantation and mill workers in the area.

Mary looks like a typical Filipino devotee Bethune has seen attending mass. She spoke extensively with Filipinos about their faith, beliefs, and their positions in culture and society. Bethune’s use of pop art is one of the many ways she was ahead of her time. She insisted that part of the language in her liturgical art be in the vernacular of Hiligaynon. This was years ahead of Vatican II, which allowed the use of local languages in mass. But Bethune made the Filipino the central force of this powerful liturgical art and her work of mercy.

You may reach Chong Ardivilla at kartunistatonto@gmail.com or chonggo.bsky.social

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