Women with Baskets and Mangoes
signed and dated 1980 (lower right)
oil on canvas
30” x 36” (76 cm x 91 cm)

Provenance:
Aquired directly from the artist by the present owner

Literature:
Guillermo, Alice G, Anita Magsaysay - Ho: A Retrospective, A. Magsaysay Inc., Manila, 1988, p.135

Exhibited:
The Metropolitan Museum of Manila, Anita Magsaysay - Ho: A Retrospective, Manila, December 15, 1988 - January 15, 1989

Lone woman of the 13 Moderns, Anita Magsaysay Ho is considered the female Amorsolo. She graduated from the School of Fine Arts at the University of the Philippines, receiving her training with Amorsolo and Ireneo Miranda. She continued her studies inArt in New York, becoming a member of the Art Student League (ASL). It was under Zoltan Sepeshy at Cranbrook Academy ofArt, that she learned the medium which she was to master: egg tempera.

Another mentor from the Art Student League, Kenneth Hayes Miller, who also mentored Edward Hopper, was instrumental in guiding Magsaysay-Ho towards a wholly modernist foundation, allowing her a complete break with the idealised genre scenes and realist techniques she had been drilled in during her youth.

“Miller taught Anita to see the whole picture in an oil painting, sharpening her compositional sense. She learned to apply a sienna ground as the unifying element in a painting. He coached her to always begin with the dark portion on a painting, never with the bright portions. To relate the subject to the background, she was taught Miller’s technique of interweaving dark and light areas so they ‘hold each other.’ Also from Miller... Anita learned the compositional device of painting women in pairs. This interaction between two or more figures remains a Magsaysay-Ho forte.” (Afredo Roces, Anita Magsaysay-Ho: In Praise of Women, The Philippines, 2005, p. 33)

For genre, Anita Magsaysay-Ho chose the peasant provincial woman as the central figure in her paintings. She always paints peasant women in groups or in multiples of threes. In the book “ANITA MAGSAYSAY-HO: Isang Pag Alaala- A Retrospective” Alice G Guillermo writes: “During the late Seventies and early eighties, the artist begins to paint large half figures, the movement diverted to small but powerful nods of exchange and acknowledgement. The pictorial field is entirely occupied by women surrounded by baskets, fruits or tamed birds hopping about them.”

“Women with Baskets and Mangoes” was done in 1980, at a period when she had “completely departed from her earlierangular and vigorous style influenced by American gestural expressionism of the fifties, to discover exquisiteness in the quiet and serenity of the women.” The Fifties were largely drawn from the New York artistic influences of the time, the Sixties took up the concept of the interplay of artistic control, and from the mid-Seventies showed the artist as having moved away from the pressures of her influences and finally an output all her own.