Unprecedented exposure for Amorsolo paintings

Fernando C. Amorsolo who, through eight decades produced over 10,000 paintings, sketches and drawings, and whose masterpieces are “true reflections of the Filipino soul”, will be given unprecedented exposure by seven of Metro Manila’s biggest museums which will take turns exhibiting his works.

The rare honor is richly deserved. Regarded a national treasure and an artistic legend, Amorsolo, four days after his death, was posthumously conferred the country’s very first National Artist Award in 1972.

According to the Ayala Museum curator, Amorsolo became known as the “painter of the Philippine sunlight” because of his talent for capturing the brilliance and shimmer of the Philippine sun on his subjects, a talent which modern painter Fernando Zobel de Ayala duly recognized.

The curator continues: “More than having captured the sun, Amorsolo painted the glow from within — Filipino values, character and soul. Many of his portraits of women in the countryside and in his studio are fine examples of this.

“While many of his pre-war (American) period dalagang bukid types were tangible expressions of the prevailing sentiments of the country’s optimism and hope-filled visions his numerous post-war variations of the subject showed concern for the local market’s growing demands. The Ayala exhibition ‘Amorsolo’s Maidens Concealed and Revealed’ from Oct. 23 to March 8, 2009 will survey Amorsolo’s rendering of women as a means of following his career, and will draw attention to his maidens from the American period and his studies of nudes from the post-war years as a tribute to his brilliance.”

The GSIS Museum's ‘Rituals and Amorsolo’, from Oct. 2 to Dec. 20, “underlines how rituals reflect values, beliefs, and shared knowledge, how it brings about interactions among people, places and objects, how it expresses the core of social identity of communities, how it fortifies social structures and institutions, and perpetuates social values. Portrayals include baptisms, praying the Angelus, a family’s walk to Sunday mass.”

The Lopez Memorial Museum’s ‘Tell Tale: The Artist as Storyteller, Amorsolo as Co-Author’, from Sept. 24 to April 4, 2009, is illustrative of Amorsolo’s generation of artists, of how Amorsolo became subject to the workings of image-making industries central to the crafting of fictions — about what it was to be a citizen, to be learned/civilized, to be devout, to be Filipino in the transitional junctures of Spanish-American rule. Beyond looking at illustrations as potboilers, the exhibit hopes to look at how artists such as Amorsolo may have brought other layers of meaning upon texts primarily intended as didactic instruments.”

The Metropolitan Museum’s ‘Philippine Staple: The Land, the Harvest, the Maestro’ will display a harvest field of rice-related pieces and outstanding landscapes.”

At the National Museum’s ‘Master Copy’ from Sept. 25 to Jan. 15, 2009, the drawings transfigure into portraits that imagine the national self and the imperialist other, the Filipino and the American, a President like Manuel Roxas or a Gov. Gen. like Francis Burton Harrison, an elegant American lady or a nameless Katipunan revolutionary immortalized in oil after their stint in sketches.”

The Jorge B. Vargas Museum’s ‘Amorsolo: His Contemporaries and Pictures of the War, Capturing Anxieties’, from Sept. 23 to Nov. 16, will feature the works of Amorsolo and his contemporaries spanning the Second World War (1941-1945) until the immediate postwar years (1946-1947), family and official portraits commissioned by Vargas, and genre paintings. Works by peers — Manansala, Saguil, Miranda and Castañeda — will also be showcased.

Yuchengco Museum’s ‘Mukang Tsinoy’ from Oct. 1 to Jan. 17, 2009, will exhibit paintings commissioned by Tsinoy families.

Speakers at the Pen press conference on “His Art, Our Heart” were Evelyn Lim Forbes, Doris Magsaysay Ho, Cristina Estrada who represented the exhibition beneficiary CRIBS, the artist’s daughter Sylvia Amorsolo Lazo, Tony Maughan and Jaime Laya.