He led the revolutionary Thirteen Moderns, who engaged their classical compatriots in heated debate over the nature and function of art.

Nonetheless, he moved on to Seattle and enrolled at the University of Washington where he took up architecture and later earned a Master of Fine Arts in Painting.

His growing appreciation to what he saw veered him away from the conservative academic art and Realistic schools and thus he began to paint in the modern manner.

Paintings he saw dealt with similar themes and were done in a limited technique that mostly followed the works of Fernando Amorsolo, the first Philippine national artist and the most popular painter of the time.

So in December, Edades bravely mounted a one-man show at the Philippine Columbia Club in Ermita to introduce to the masses what his modern art was all about.

It was a distinguished exhibit, for the Filipino art circle was suddenly shaken by what this young man from Pangasinan had learned from his studies abroad.

In The Market and The Picnic, his choice of subject matter do not take flight from pleasant daily scenery; yet his brush strokes and observance of non-proportionality in the figures made his teachers consider him "very ambitious."

They are a far cry from the works of the first Philippine national artist and most popular painter Fernando Amorsolo and the other classicists who painted bright cheery scenes of flawless Filipinos and their idealized daily routines.

Edades, on the other hand, presented figures in muddy earth colors – yellow ochres and raw sienna accented by bold black contours.

Subjects are distorted figures (those whose proportions defy classical measure), and Edades’ brush strokes are agitated and harsh.

Through his continuous propagation of modern art as shown in his works and teachings, Edades proved that modernists were not fooling people as Guillermo Tolentino asserted.

Modern Art is the interpretation of the Classical concept conditioned by the artist's new experience with the aid of improved means of aesthetic expression."

In the same period, works by other Philippine modernists Anita Magsaysay-Ho, José T. Joya and Hernando R. Ocampo have already broken world record prices at auction.

[1] On November 22, 2014, an early work from 1926 called American Football Player sold for a record price of PHP9.276 million (US$205,923.65) at a Christie's auction in Hong Kong.