ORIGINALLY WRITTEN AT THE Lifestyle Section of PTV 5 Lifestyle and Culture

Works of ‘lost’ Art Master Constancio Bernardo 

​The late artist Constancio Bernardo was a top student of maestro Fernando Amorsolo and considered peer by Josef Albers. A retrospective exhibition of the works of Bernardo (1913-2003) marks the artist’s birth centenary at Ayala Museum in Makati City, starting November 27 (Wednesday) through February 28, 2014.

The exhibit celebrates the artist’s life and work as well as revisits a critical gap in the history of Philippine abstraction that has been previously remained unaddressed.
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Featured are a total of around 100 works that gives viewers a range of his works, from his self-portraits and paintings as a student of Fernando Amorsolo at the UP School of Fine Arts, to his sketches as a Fulbright scholar at Yale University, and to his canvases of abstraction—that were hailed by a number of critics from the 1950s onward as among the most important examples of Philippine modernist painting but increasingly overlooked as the decades passed.

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Perpetual Motion (Opus No. 1), 1950 Acrylic over oil on canvas 98 x 127 cms. Image courtesy of Ayala Museum.

Constancio Bernardo’s ‘Self-Portrait, 25 years old.’ 1938 Charcoal on paper 60 x 48 cm. Image courtesy of the Ayala Museum.

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​Participating in various group and solo exhibitions, and a retrospective in UP Baguio in 1969, and at the  Museum of Philippine Art in 1978, and at the Cultural Center of the Philippines in 1990, much still remains to be known about Bernardo. A dedicated teacher at the University of the Philippines, Bernardo tended to shy away from the limelight and would prefer to focus on his work tirelessly in his studio.

From Ayala Museum’s write-up on the retrospective: “This exhibition showcases not only his astounding ease with shifting from one style to another but also the rigor and discipline exemplified by each body of work. The disadvantage of his limited commercial success in his lifetime is in its own way the advantage of having a body of work that’s almost intact to reconsider in the context of the larger history of Philippine art in general and Philippine abstraction in particular and provides an opportunity for the public to be introduced or reintroduced to the work of an important artist.”


​Published at Lifestyle Section, InterAksyon.com · Wednesday, November 27, 2013 · 1:02 pm

Constancio Bernardo’s Figure Drawing, Yale University, 1949. Charcoal and chalk on paper, 64 x 48 cms. Image courtesy of the Ayala Museum.