Fred and Lisa Elizalde with Fred’s cheeky self-portrait
In the Elizalde home, walls burst with color—canvases of prismatic hues, abstract forms and figurative studies collected over a lifetime. Yet in the living room, it is a somber work in greys and sharp whites that draws the eye. A streak of white slices through jagged boulders, its glow scattering across rippled water. The bold, urgent brushstrokes reflect Fred J. Elizalde himself—media baron, arts patron, and lifelong painter—emerging from grief after the death of his second wife, Joan Gatlin, in 1996.
Months later, Fred met ballerina Lisa Macuja in a performance he attended with his daughter, Thalassa, known as Sasha. By the following year, they were married, and later, would have two children: Michelle Elizabeth, now a lawyer, and Manuel Cesar, known as Mac, who is doing field work for his doctorate in archaeology at University of California Los Angeles. Ballet Manila, the company Lisa co-founded and now leads, has become a cornerstone of the country’s dance scene.
The Elizaldes are, in many ways, a family of firsts. Fred’s father, Manuel “Manolo” Elizalde, was Cambridge-educated, played the saxophone and clarinet, captained polo teams, and built a sprawling business empire under Elizalde & Co., Inc. that stretched across shipping, paints, spirits, steel, rope, insurance, mining, and sugar. He was an early media pioneer, cofounding Manila Broadcasting Company (MBC) with his brothers and putting up the print media business with Fred’s help. DZRH, now on its 86th year, remains the country’s oldest and largest radio network. Today, Fred chairs both MBC and its parent, Elizalde Holdings Corporation, and the FJE Group of Companies.
His mother, Mary Cadwallader, born in the Philippines to an American family, came from a line of builders and cultural patrons. Her family lived along Roxas Boulevard, the enclave of the affluent before and after the war. With Don Manolo, she raised three children—Mary Ruth, Manuel Jr., and Fred, the youngest.
Fred’s birthplace, the family’s Donada Street home in Manila, built in 1913, was torched by Japanese forces during the war and was later rebuilt. When developer Enrique Zobel invited the family to relocate to Forbes Park, Don Manolo chose to stay on in Donada.
Elizalde’s work inspired by the angular perspective of T. Lux Feininger
Fred attended the American School, now the International School Manila, before leaving for Harvard, where he graduated magna cum laude in psychology and social relations in 1962. He later enrolled at Cambridge to study architecture, but did not complete the program. While at Harvard, he became involved with Opus Dei, a Catholic institution founded in Spain that emphasizes finding spiritual meaning in everyday life. It was also there that he studied under painter Theodore Lux Feininger, whose prismatic abstract style—rooted in the Bauhaus tradition of his father, Lyonel Feininger—left a lasting imprint on Fred. Feininger’s use of overlapping planes, sharp lines, fragmented shapes, and angular perspectives would later surface in some of Fred’s works.
As Fred turns 85 this August 17, an exhibit at Conrad Manila will celebrate his life and his art. “Fred doesn’t really like big celebrations,” says Lisa. “But I told him, at 85, we have to celebrate. We missed his 80th in 2020 because of the pandemic. This time we wanted a big party.”
His creations capture moments from a life rich with comfort, desires, enduring hope, profound pain, extensive travels, and simple curiosity
Fred’s artistic pursuits stretch back over six decades, his work reflecting the varied circumstances of his life. His creations capture moments from a life rich with comfort, desires, enduring hope, profound pain, extensive travels, and simple curiosity. He approached his art with unbridled freedom, always doing as he pleased. This might explain why he never settled on a single style, preferring instead to exhibit his broad range and various influences.
Regardless, his paintings are clearly playful and passionate, evident in his powerful color choices, distortion of forms for expressionist effect, and his use of only the finest paints.
Much of Fred’s art straddles the line between the recognizable and the abstract. In his semi-abstract works, familiar figures and faces are pared down, recast through bold shapes and saturated colors.
Realism is never the point; instead, mood and memory take precedence. One sepia-toned family portrait captures Fred with his daughter Sasha and his late wife, Joan Gatlin, painted shortly after her death in 1996. Joan’s eyes are rendered in stark white, a quiet visual metaphor for her passing, while Fred’s and Sasha’s remain warm brown.
Elizalde’s figurative study of a former girlfriend
Elsewhere, the personal blends with the playful. A former girlfriend appears as a girl with cascading brown hair, tilting her head upward, smoke curling from her lips. A more unsettling canvas shows two nude female figures, turned toward one another, with the face of a man emerging unmistakably from a woman’s groin—provocative, almost mischievous.
Lisa is a frequent muse: an abstraction in pink and blue captures the early fullness of her first pregnancy
Lisa is a frequent muse: an abstraction in pink and blue captures the early fullness of her first pregnancy, while a semi-realistic portrait immortalizes her as a crimson Carmen.
Firebird by Fred Elizalde
History, too, finds its way into his canvases. One stark painting recalls the assassination of former First Lady Aurora Quezon by insurgents in Baler, Quezon, distilled into the silhouette of a Buick and the memory of fallen bodies. In contrast, portraits of Lisa in prismatic tones evoke her stage presence: two horizontal panels, inspired by guest choreographer Jean-Paul Comelin’s Firebird, conjure her with outstretched wings—a role she never danced because of pregnancy.
Elizalde’s portrait of Henri Eteve painting ‘Di Meliora’
Collaboration has also shaped Fred’s practice. One canvas, a bird’s-eye view of a work by his close friend, French painter-sculptor Henri Eteve, overlays Elizalde’s hand with Eteve’s celebrated Di Meliora series. And in a more lighthearted moment, Fred once asked to be photographed mid-bike ride, mouth wide open in mock surprise; the resulting portrait bursts with reds, oranges, and yellows, an impish self-portrait in paint.
Elizalde’s poster art style
Taken together, his palette ranges from quiet sepia tones to electric cyan, warm earths to icy cools—each a reflection of a life lived without stylistic boundaries.
“I don’t have any favorite here because I like them all,” Fred says, glancing around his home, where art fills every corner and ceiling.
Bedroom designed by Fred Elizalde carries Bauhaus influence.
One bedroom, designed by Fred himself, reflects his fascination with Bauhaus aesthetics. A coffered ceiling emphasizes bold geometric shapes, while waves of primary colors sweep across the walls and windows: yellow for Boracay’s sand, blue for the sea, green for the forest, and orange for the setting sun. It was the couple’s bedroom until a hip replacement surgery prompted them to relocate to the ground floor. The master bedroom now bears his latest works—bold, gestural strokes painted directly on the doors.
The space houses a trove of memories, aside from walls and ceilings blanketed with his canvases, portraits of his father, Cambodian silver, and Buddhas collected on their travels.
In the garden stand sculptures by Henri Eteve, Fred’s longtime collaborator and neighbor; on the carpet, designs from Eteve’s Di Meliora series frame a low Japanese table and a black leather sofa from Joan’s collection.
Personal treasures include two nude sketches by Vicente Manansala and a Federico Aguilar Alcuaz painting of three women peering from a window, once offered by art collector/bon vivant Louie Cruz to settle rent on Fred’s Boracay property.
Family and artistic life intertwine everywhere. Dance photographs of Lisa line the walls, and a Pushkin Medal—the Russian Order of Friendship awarded her by President Vladimir Putin in 2000, commemorating 25 years of Philippine-Russian diplomatic ties—rests among the keepsakes.
For Fred, every canvas, every brushstroke is less about settling on a style than about capturing the passing colors of a life fully lived. As he turns 85, the upcoming exhibition feels less like a summing up than a glimpse into a restless, playful spirit—still painting, still searching, still filling the walls around him with stories only he can tell.
