Amorsolo & the Modern Mind

National Artist Fernando Cueto Amorsolo’s images might reflect now-unfamiliar scenes of a  long-gone era,  but, as Reuben Ramas Cañete writes, the maestro was truly way ahead of his time.

Fernando Amorsolo's "Planting Rice with Mayon Volcano", 1949, 70 x 100.5 cm, Oil on canvas
From the Del Monte Collection
Image courtesy of Metropolitan Museum of Manila

Amorsolo & the Modern Mind

Perhaps the most widely recognized and beloved artist of the Philippines, Fernando Cueto Amorsolo (1892-1972) has been invariably categorized as a classicist, academic artist, or impressionist. This is based on the contention that his paintings and drawings of the Philippine rural countryside and its hardworking peasants, sensual country lasses (known as dalagang bukid), and portraits of Manila’s privileged elite are based on a classical tradition stretching back to the Renaissance and Neoclassical roots of Western figurative art, an artform that has seen fit not only to canonize figures like Leonardo, Rembrandt, or Poussin, but also to hark back to an even earlier tradition of figure painting now lost to us, the Greco-Roman wall frescoes and panel paintings from the 5th Century BC to the 3rd Century AD, and extolled by such writers as Herodotus, Epicurius, Cicero, or Pliny.

However, the historical conditions that Amorsolo lived in, the audiences that either eagerly sought out or criticized his work, and the nation-state that he was a part of is undeniably modern in its conception and practice. This much is in evidence when one views cursorily the few authoritative publications on Amorsolo since 1975, when the Filipinas Foundation published the landmark bio-coffee table book on the artist written by Alfredo Roces; as well as this year’s seven-museum extravaganza on Amorsolo in Manila with the theme His Art, Our Heart. Indeed, the national scope of Amorsolo’s contribution to a sense of common identity in this year’s exhibition program was expanded when one of the participating museums, the Metropolitan Museum of Manila, executed 20 “satellite” exhibitions on Amorsolo, from Vigan City in the north to Zamboanga City in the south, dealing with various aspects of Amorsolo’s agricultural-rural milieu.

This “nationality” should be kept in mind as we assess the aesthetic and art historical position of Amorsolo in Philippine Art. Often, the nationalist angle of art production is sublimated based on formal or connoisseurly interests, and instead is sealed within a hermetic envelope of literature that explains away the subject as a matter of “artistic license” or “available material” that is then transformed magically by “the genius of the artist” into a universal and humanist assertion of the resulting artwork’s “timelessness,” evocation of “eternal values,” and assertion of the artist’s inclusion into the canon of great art. Doubtless, this very argument actually identifies the aesthetic narrative of, say Amorsolo, as a by-product of the processes of modernism, because we locate modernism not only in terms of the specifically distorting and reductive practices associated with such 20th Century art forms as Expressionism or Abstraction, but as a set of ideas and consequent practices grounded in modernizing processes that have been at work since the Renaissance.