Hernando R. Ocampo

Hernando Ruiz Ocampo (1911–1978) was one of the founders of modern painting in the Philippines and, from 1991, a National Artist for Visual Arts. Born in Santa Cruz, Manila, on 28 April 1911, the son of Emilio Ocampo and Delfina Ruiz, he studied law, commerce and creative writing but taught himself to paint, learning from reproductions in magazines. He came to art through literature: he organised the Veronicans, a group of progressive writers, wrote fiction and poetry in English and Tagalog — the short story Rice and Bullets, the collections Ikalawang Pagdalaw and Unang Pamumulaklak, the poems of Don’t Cry, Don’t Fret — contributed to Taliba and the Manila Sunday Chronicle, and later wrote and directed for radio, television and the Filipino Players Guild.

In 1938 Ocampo joined the Thirteen Moderns, the group gathered by Victorio Edades that turned Philippine painting away from the academic realism of the Amorsolo school. With Vicente Manansala and Cesar Legaspi he formed the neo-realist triumvirate of the post-war years, painting the hardship of the city — Slum Dwellers, Man and Carabao, Calvary — in angular, simplified forms. Through the 1960s his work moved into pure abstraction: fields of interlocking biomorphic shapes in saturated reds, oranges, yellows, greens and blues, of which Genesis (1968), the design for the curtain of the Cultural Center of the Philippines’ main theatre, is the best known, together with the Mutants series.

A member of the Saturday Group of artists and writers, he received the Republic Cultural Heritage Award in 1965, the Patnubay ng Sining at Kalinangan award of the City of Manila in 1969 and the Diwa ng Lahi award in 1976. He died in Caloocan on 28 December 1978 and was named National Artist of the Philippines posthumously in 1991.