Known as the ‘master of Philippine sunlight,’ Fernando Amorsolo is the painter most associated with the Philippine landscape and Philippine pastoral, bringing to both a decided innocence, if not sunlit grace. More than merely formal experimentation with light, however, Amorsolo is canonical because of the distinctly national-pastoral conceptions his work elaborates. Juan Luna, Fernando Amorsolo, and Fernando Zóbel de Ayala are regularly recognized as the three masters of Philippine fine arts. Their works dominate the Philippine canon and, by extension, elite notions of Philippine art. However Amorsolo’s particularizing of the (tropical) place of the Philippines separates him from his colleagues.
An anti-colonial, nationalistic celebration of precolonial, inherent “goodness”—a vision of a simple kind of goodness that I argue is explicitly tied to nature—charged Amorsolo’s works as well as his popular national reception. The American colonial period during the 1920s-30s sparked a wave of national nostalgia for the Filipino pastoral life, with Tagalog songs and Spanish poetry eulogizing the simple, happy barrio life that seemed to be increasingly receding. Amorsolo was part of this wave, which drew on the thwarted independence struggle of the Philippine Revolution, societal reaction to and cultural dislocations across the transition from Spanish to American colonialism, and ongoing political debates surrounding independence. Yet, despite round praise for his “democratic” art and celebration of the common Filipino, Amorsolo’s idea of goodness has deep connection to an underlying elitism in Philippine society and contributes to Amorsolo’s appeal among the elite class. In particular, his elitist vision of the good as grounded in nature had consequences for human relationships with the natural environment, while also being itself a result of existing class relationships with nature. This talk seeks to analyze the relationship between the elite class and nature through close analysis of Amorsolo’s landscape and genre painting.
This event was recorded and the video can be watched here.
Speaker and Chair Biographies:
Originally from the Philippines, Nicole CuUnjieng Aboitiz is a Research Fellow at the University of Cambridge, a Visiting Fellow at the LSE SEAC, and Executive Director of the Toynbee Prize Foundation. She was formerly a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs at Harvard University, and she earned her Ph.D. in Southeast Asian and International History at Yale University. Her first book, Asian Place, Filipino Nation: A Global Intellectual History of the Philippine Revolution, 1887-1912 (Columbia University Press, 2020) uncovers the Pan-Asianism of the Southeast Asian "periphery" and its role in creating modern Asia, offering a vital new perspective on the Philippine Revolution's global context and content.
Prof. John Sidel is the Sir Patrick Gillam Professor of International and Comparative Politics at the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). Professor Sidel received his BA and MA from Yale University and his PhD from Cornell University. He is the author of Capital, Coercion, and Crime: Bossism in the Philippines (1999), Philippine Politics and Society in the Twentieth Century: Colonial Legacies, Postcolonial Trajectories (2000), Riots, Pogroms, Jihad: Religious Violence in Indonesia (2006), The Islamist Threat in Southeast Asia: A Reassessment (2007), Thinking and Working Politically in Development: Coalitions for Change in the Philippines (2020, with Jaime Faustino) and a forthcoming book Republicanism, Communism, Islam: Cosmopolitan Origins of Revolution in Southeast Asia.