National-ish artists : Victorio Edades and the founding of Filipino modern art

Abstract

Victorio Edades has long been regarded as the founding father of modern art in the Philippines. For a long time, the artist’s devotion to this cause has been traced to a paradigm-altering encounter with Post- Impressionist art in 1922 or 1923 at a travelling iteration of the New York Armory Hall show which reached Seattle while Edades was a student at the University of Washington. Closer examination of paintings and documentation relating to Edades’ time in Seattle, however, reveal that this is almost certainly not the case. Strong evidence suggests both that the New York Armory Hall show never reached Seattle and that Edades’ first encounter with modernist art occurred at the University of Washington itself.

This thesis offers new analysis of Edades’ career as a modernist artist over several decades of rapid social and political change. It re- examines the sources that influenced his practice as an artist and art educator, situating his early work in relation to the art and ideas being circulated in the Pacific Northwest in the 1920s and then in Southeast Asia through World War II, decolonisation and the establishment of national and regional identity in the post- independence era. It also interrogates the Armory Hall narrative that was constructed in defiance of the primary sources, exploring possible reasons first for its creation and then for its endurance over some fifty years of scholarship after the fact.

Finally, it explores the implications of this more complicated narrative of Filipino modernism for the wider understanding of modern art in the Philippines, Southeast- Asia and in terms of colonial and post-colonial networks which continue to shape the discourse within which the work of Edades and his followers can be situated at national, regional and global levels.