Anita Magsaysay-Ho

Biography

Anita Magsaysay’s first prizes went to works that have no hero in the usual sense: “Cooks” (1952), “Two Women” (1960), “Mending the Nets” (1959). In each, women are simply busy with a task.

She was born on 25 May 1914 in Manila, as Anita Corpus Magsaysay. Her father, Ambrosio Magsaysay, was an engineer; her cousin was the future president of the Philippines, Ramon Magsaysay. At thirteen she entered the School of Fine Arts of the University of the Philippines. Her teachers there were Fabian de la Rosa, Fernando Amorsolo and his brother Pablo Amorsolo, and she then moved to the School of Design, under Victorio Edades and Enrique Ruiz. In the 1930s she went to the United States, where she studied at the Cranbrook Academy in Michigan, taking a course in oil painting, and drawing at the Art Students League in New York. There she met Robert Ho from Hong Kong, also a student. They married in 1947 and moved to China, where Ho founded the shipping company Magsaysay Inc. The couple had five children. Because of her husband’s business the family moved often: Brazil, Canada, Hong Kong, New York, Washington, Japan. Over fifty years they changed houses about thirty times, after first living in Manila for fourteen years. Wherever she lived she had a studio, and she spent most of her time in it.

All the same, she painted Filipino women, from memory, saying that they were the ones she knew. Most often they are women cooking, harvesting, working on farms, looking after children. The artist herself said she liked to paint women working in the fields, because work shows their strength. There is no anger in these figures; they are not concerned with gender roles or politics, just as the women of her childhood were not. Her favourite medium was egg tempera, but it was physically demanding, and she later turned to oils, acrylics, drawing and lithography. Her tempera works are especially sought after today. In the early 1940s Amorsolo’s influence was plain, in the subjects and in the bright palette; for her preference for women as subjects she was even nicknamed the “Female Amorsolo”. Later the figures began to distort, the faces became semi-abstract, and Cubism showed in her manner.

Her work differs from decade to decade. In the 1950s she was shown at the Philippine Art Association alongside other Neo-Realists, and the best-known pictures, with their contrasts of light and shadow, date from then. In the 1960s the figures became more elongated and more loosely spaced, and the tones softened. In the 1970s she took up Chinese calligraphy and made forms from nature with ink blots. In the 1980s she used green tones for fruit and vegetables that often resembled women.

Association prizes: first place in 1952 for “Cooks”, second in 1953 for “Fruit Vendors”, first in 1959 for “Mending the Nets”, first in 1960 for “Two Women”, second in 1962 for “Trio”. In 1950 “Five Senses” had also won second prize at the Manila Grand Opera House exhibition.

In 1958 a panel of experts assembled by the Manila Chronicle named her one of the six most significant painters in the history of the Philippines. She was soon counted among the “Thirteen Moderns”, a group of Filipino modernist artists, in which she remained the only woman. In 2005 Alfredo Roces published a book about her, “Anita Magsaysay-Ho: In Praise of Women”.

Her works are held by the Ateneo Art Gallery and the Metropolitan Museum of Manila in Manila, the Lopez Memorial Museum and Library in Pasig, the Yuchengco Museum in Makati and the Iloilo Museum of Contemporary Art. In 2024 she was shown at the 60th Venice Biennale, and the Ramon Magsaysay Museum held the exhibition “Contrast: The Life and Legacy of Anita Magsaysay-Ho”.

She painted into old age, until she had a stroke in 2009. She died on 5 May 2012 in Manila, aged 97. Senator Franklin Drilon introduced a resolution to confer on her the title of National Artist, but it did not pass: at the time of her death Magsaysay-Ho was a Canadian citizen.