DAPPLED IN GOLDEN SUNLIGHT, a bedimpled girl smiles at us. The green mangoes that she seems to be coyly offering echo the shape of her face. With her full lips, pert nose, and eyes that hint of mischief, she could be the girl next door but for her get-up and accoutrements. Dressed in a simple baro't saya, with a headscarf, and carrying a basket of what seems to be the day's marketing, she is located back to the time of our grandmothers--the age of sleepy dust roads, calesas, and church belfries. It is a charming sight and it is no wonder that the painter, National Artist Fernando Amorsolo, throughout his long and illustrious career kept coming back to this vision of innocent and untroubled beauty.
Other paintings by Amorsolo depict other aspects of this bygone era. One of his favorite subjects, the tinikling or bamboo pole dance, shows what seems to be an impromptu cultural program. Beside a river, by a field, or in the shadow of a church belfry, a young couple dances, usually to the accompaniment of a lone guitarist, with the audience enjoying a lull from their labors. Another recurring theme is of rural damsels in a river setting, doing the laundry with effortless grace.
In Amorsolo's world where it is eternally the golden hour, all the women are winsome and all the men bronzed. The artist himself once made explicit his formula for the dalagang Filipina's specific pulchritude (i.e., a rounded face, exceptionally lively eyes, blunt nose but firm and strongly marked, clear skin or fresh-colored like that of a blushing girl). It is a formula which has stood well the test of time.
In fact, Amorsolo made no secret of his project of idealization. Reaching the peak of fame and fortune during the Commonwealth and after, he almost single-handedly defended the academic and conservative school from the modernists at the gates led by Victorio Edades.
Previously, his ascendance in the art world had been unquestioned. Peerless and with an aesthetic pedigree that goes back to Juan Luna and Felix Resurreccion Hidalgo, Amorsolo could do no wrong as far as current tastes went. Such was his popularity during his lifetime that he had to keep a catalogue of his works to be duplicated (with minor variations, of course) as per client's request. The demand resulted in an oeuvre that is estimated at more than 10,000 works. After his posthumous proclamation as the first National Artist for Painting in 1972, the market value of his paintings soared and continues to do so.
The greatest challenge to Amorsolo's art, however, was not so much the inevitable artistic trend towards modernism, but the changing times. It is strange to think that, in 1951, when he painted the girl with mangoes, the Philippines had just emerged from the horrors of World War II, with Manila as one of the most devastated cities in the world--second only to Warsaw, as some accounts would have it. The nuclear bomb had already been invented and used to unspeakable effect in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. At the time of painting, Amorsolo was already recording a disappearing world, or an idealized but perhaps once-possible world in the penultimate stage of evanescence.
This is not to say that Amorsolo continued to paint bucolic idylls while Manila burned. His gaze immediately shifted to the reality of war with particular emphasis on the suffering of Filipino women whose beauty he immortalized so well. Among his most famous paintings from this period is the movie-still-like "Defend Thy Honor," a large work which depicts a man with a machete rescuing a disheveled girl from dishonor at the hands of a Japanese soldier (off-screen but represented by his military cap). Behind the couple, to the left, is a richly-appointed altar with a large crucifix and two still-lighted candles.
The symbolism requires no elaboration and the painting was soon acquired by a General Lowe who came to the Philippines to assist Senator Tydings in ironing out the terms of our country's independence. While "Defend Thy Honor" elicits the proper indignation, Amorsolo was at his best in portraying an antebellum world of sweetness and light. The entrance of a contravida brings in a whiff of reality that threatens to topple an already fragile balance, and geopolitics is no simple melodrama.
Fast forward to the present when the simple life evokes images not of dalagang Filipina but of Paris and Nicole, and reality, to be of any interest, has to be televised. At a time that some claim to be postmodern, what can we make of an artist who was at the vanguard against modernism? We live in a world that is undergoing a crisis in values and most of us who reached consciousness in the age of globalization can have only the flimsiest notion of nationalism--of "country" as synonymous to "home."
This might explain the renewed interest in Amorsolo, as the painter par excellence of a paradise lost. A forthcoming multi-venue exhibit, a massive retrospective of the "Grand Old Man of Philippine Art," promises the laudable attempt to "reinvigorate national identity through an appreciation of culture and tradition" and to introduce Amorsolo to the youth as "relevant, hip and cool."
In 1922, Amorsolo painted what many consider to be his first important work, "Rice Planting." It shows a group of peasants engaged in what a local ditty describes as "hindi biro" but what strikes the viewer most is the purity of light and color. It is an image that, once seen, can only be etched in the mind. Later, he painted many more landscapes, peopled and unpeopled, which the cognoscenti adjudge to be his most successful works.
In truth, Amorsolo's vision persists in our collective memory. What Filipino child, at one time or another, hasn't drawn a landscape with mountains, some coconut trees, a ricefield, and a nipa hut, all basking in the glow of a setting sun? The prototype for this is almost certainly an Amorsolo. (Sofia Guillermo)