The legends who dared: Modernists in Philippine art

After World War II, Manila was in ruins. While the city and its people struggled with shortages, displacement, and trauma, the greater Philippines—newly independent and scarred—faced a daunting question: Who are we now?

For Filipino artists, the answers were no longer in Amorsolo’s sunlit fields or Luna’s grand mythological scenes. Instead, they forged ahead to paint in a style that was bold and new, painting a fractured world where hope still shone through the pigments.

Juvenal Sansó, for one, was just a youth during the war—scarred from torture by Japanese soldiers, a family home burned to the ground, and a bombing near-death experience. Post-war, he went straight to art school, studying under Amorsolo and diluting pigments with fruit juices when supplies ran dry.

Sansó was not alone. A whole generation of artists stepped away from themes of romanticism and myth. Instead, they forged a new language of art, one that spoke to a fractured yet hopeful nation that was not exactly copying Europe’s avant-garde, but modern on its own terms.

At León Gallery’s Magnificent September Auction 2025 this Saturday, Sept. 13, works by the Modernists continue to shine on the block.

Here is a rundown of just a few of the modernists who dared.

Ang Kiukok

Where others found light, Kiukok leaned into angst. His figures—distorted, screaming, bound—gave form to existential dread, yet also struck a chord with audiences who knew too well the pain of living in turbulent times.

In his Cubist visual language, Kiukok often portrayed religious themes, from the Holy Mother to his striking renditions of Jesus on the cross, to his many paintings of dogs. All three subjects of the artist will be on the block at León Gallery’s Magnificent September Auction 2025.

Anita Magsaysay-Ho

The lone woman among the “Thirteen Moderns,” Magsaysay-Ho captured Filipina women in markets and fields. Her stylized, often sinewy figures radiated a sense of strength, grounding modernism in the daily labor and dignity of Filipina women’s lives.

At León Gallery’s The Spectacular Midyear Auction 2025, her rare egg tempera work, “Water Carriers,” sold for P60M. The painting exemplified her extraordinary patience and technical skill working with the elusive, age-old medium of egg tempera.

For the auction house’s September auction, another painting of Magsaysay-Ho emerges from the same egg tempera vein, also created during her time studying in the US, this time of women “Pounding Rice.”

Cesar Legaspi

Legaspi’s angular forms carried weight, literally. Reimagined through cubism, his quintessential social realist renderings showed the laboring body in all its struggle, seeming to remind that rebuilding the nation went beyond thought and into physical, hard work.

His works seem to glow, elevating the human figure from a subject to a metaphor, as Jed Daya writes in the auction’s catalog notes, “Shadows carve out musculature, while reds and oranges bathe the scene in a warm, almost tactile glow…. figures twist and interlock like welded metal,” writes Daya. “Yin and yang in perpetual motion.”

Hernando R. Ocampo

The canvases of Ocampo throbbed with biomorphic forms that were more often than not fiery. Veering away from decorative elements, his abstractions radiated raw energy, perhaps as if capturing both the chaos and the resilience of a country piecing itself together.

Post-war, his biographer Angel de Jesus describes his years from 1945 to 1962 as his “transitional period,” removing distinguishable details of the human anatomy or perspective, as “his forms became increasingly distorted… The painting became a living, organic, logical unit.”

José Joya

Joya’s sweeping, gestural abstractions embodied momentum, with strokes in motion that often feel wild, ambitious, and restless. For a people eager to move past war and colonial shadows, this Filipino Modernist seemed to promote movement toward the future.

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Spontaneous, yet controlled, Joya tells Cid Reyes in an interview in 1973, “I know exactly where the splash will fall, and as regards to the element of chance or accident, I believe that too can be controlled… Accident, then, becomes an integral part of the painting.”

Vicente Manansala

With his technique of transparent cubism, Manansala fractured everyday life into shimmering panes with subjects like jeepneys, market vendors, and mothers with children. He used Cubism for a Philippine cityscape, showing that the modern could be very much local and grassroots.

His favorite subject was his family. The artist had many eager patrons, and it was later discovered that he hid paintings under the bed in he and his wife’s bedroom. One of these paintings, “Family” is headed for the block at León Gallery’s Magnificent September Auction 2025.

Alfonso Ossorio

Abroad for most of his life—and often forgotten because of it—Negros-born Ossorio was no less vital to the Modernist movement.

A close friend of Jackson Pollock in New York, he embraced hybridity, fusing Abstract Expressionism with spiritual and surreal impulses. His art embodied the complexity of postwar identity, showing that being Filipino could also mean being part of a larger global conversation.

Through sharp corners, sweeping gestures, or transparent panes of color, each of these modernists forged a distinctly Filipino pulse that went against the grain.

Together, they dared to see beyond nostalgia, rising from the ashes of war to invent a style of artmaking that was experimental, personal, and national. Once defiant, now celebrated, their works return to the spotlight at León Gallery’s Magnificent September Auction 2025—reminding that art can help a wounded country imagine itself anew.