Fernando Amorsolo: A Personal View
How many of us on going to the Ayala Museum go into the Amorsolo Gallery of Painting? A recent MVP study trip included the Central Bank and the Insular Life Insurance Company where we were granted the privilege of seeing their private collections of Amorsolo paintings, and hearing some of the personal anecdotes concerning them. It was fun hearing the anecdotes but the Ayala Gallery is equally impressive in its collection. One anecdote was quite comic.
It seems a former director of the bank some years back commissioned Amorsolo to paint one of his historic renditions of an early Spanish expedition landing on a Philippine island. Amorsolo executed many paintings of the same subject matter, but each with its own variation. In this one he placed a bare-breasted island maiden of some beauty. The ladies of the time were bare-breasted. Well, it seems the director took exception to this, declared he could not have so immodest a piece hanging in his office and requested the artist clothe the lady. Amorsolo took the painting home and duly painted a small jacket over her bare breasts. At a later date this director was replaced, as directors are, by another gentleman. The second gentleman looked at the painting now in his office and declared why would the artist ever do such a thing. Everyone knows island ladies of that time were bare-breasted and did NOT wear such jackets. He immediately requested Amorsolo undress the lass. It seems it is easier for an artist to dress rather than undress and the painting, striking as it is, portrays this particular female figure still clad in her small jacket.
What is there I ask myself about an Amorsolo painting that constitutes a kind of magical aura. I am neither art critic nor reasonable judge of what constitutes "good art". I cannot tell you why one painter is more "painterly" than another, or why the work of one should be chosen over the work of another. I can understand that Fernando Amorsolo's draftsmanship was sheer genius, and that when it came to lighting and color he was a magician. But it is more than this. His portraits seem to be trying to capture all that is best in the individual whose likeness he is reproducing.
Small wonder then that stories are told of the acquisition of his portraits. A great number of Amorsolo's paintings were created during what is called "The American Period" when the Philippines was host to United States military personnel. During the first quarter of the 20th century it became quite fashionable for a U.S. military man to have a portrait of a wife, child, mother, father, sister, aunt, painted from a photograph he happened to carry with him. Many of these military men came from the Midwestern part of the United States: the Kansas, Ohio, Minnesota Volunteers. The portraits went home with them and were no doubt cherished by those for whom they were intended.
Life moves on, families change, and there may be no one now who knows or even remembers the individual whose likeness Fernando Amorsolo captured on canvas. Today the Midwest United States is among the areas Filipino students choose for educational purposes. Discreet advertisements placed in small town newspapers offering to pay from say, U.S. $500 to $700, for a painting signed by "F. Amorsolo" have, I am told, brought some portraits back to the Philippines.
An incurable romantic, I love the idyllic feeling of his rice fields, his picnics, his families who always seem to be enjoying each other and having such a good time, his laborers so at ease with themselves and their world, his streams, hills, trees, and flowers bathed in sunlight and shadow. Much of his painting was executed out of doors. But, it is said, these scenes represent an idealized world that never really existed -- and this is quite likely so.
Remember, this was the "American Period" and to my mind Amorsolo was a true revolutionary. He did not carry a gun; he did not speak in a loud voice; he did not set out to prove the pen mightier than the sword. He employed instead paintbrush and canvas to remind the Filipino people of the best that could be found in their islands, which, no matter who sat in the governor's mansion, belonged to them -- and of the best that was in themselves. He challenged his people to be proud of who and what they were and to cherish and protect what they had. In effect Amorsolo used paint and canvas as the National Hero Jose Rizal used pen and paper.
And not all of his work was idyllic. During the years of the Japanese occupation he made sketches of sights seen from his window. These pencil sketches are spare and stark, filled with the terror and anguish of the time, as are his works of the burning of Manila and witnessed scenes of sheer horror. Never was he without a sketchbook. It became a diary, and when his sketches of the occupation were on exhibit at Ayala Museum a while back, they proved as poignant and telling as any words could have been -- perhaps more so. We are told he was always the gentleman, gracious and generous. We should be forever grateful to him for providing us with a world, which, although it never truly existed, brings out the best in us as we wander happily throughout sunlit landscapes.
--Sonia Krug