{"status":true,"msg":{"data":{"id":112,"auction_id":1,"set_id":1,"lot_number":"75","artist":"Cesar Legaspi (1917 - 1994)","title":"Dancing Nudes","starting_price":1400000,"signed_dated":"signed and dated 1976 (lower right)","medium":"oil on wood panel","size":"41” x 27” (104 cm x 69 cm)","property":null,"coa":null,"provenance":"Private collection Manila","exhibited":null,"literature":null,"write_up":"By 1968, Legaspi had resigned from his responsibilities as the art director of the advertising company Philprom. Before his resignation, Legaspi had only time to focus on painting on weekends or even after office hours. But by the late 1960s, coinciding with his relinquishment of his commercial art duties, Legaspi’s full-fledged artistic flowering had begun to transpire.<br /><br />The decade of the 1960s saw Legaspi slowly veering towards abstraction, in which the subject palpably merges with its (frenzied) setting, evoking agitation and contradiction. Although still in the cubist style, Legaspi’s art evolved to an idiom characterized by “rhythmic curvilinear line and planes in contrast to the angularity of his original style [of the 1940s and the 1950s],” as the eminent art critic Alice Guillermo writes in her essay The History and Current Situation of Modern Art in the Philippines.<br /><br />However, the 1970s saw Legaspi’s full artistic maturation. Guillermo notes in the same essay: “From 1974, his paintings became more chromatic; layers of transparent passages create prismatic effects. Figures dynamically cut through space in gestural movements. Light enhances color and form or dematerializes and dissolves them into airy transparencies creating resonances in space.”<br /><br />This quality is evoked in the 1976 work at hand depicting three nude figures seemingly dancing and reveling in harmony amid a setting characterized by a chaotic assemblage of irregular geometric forms. The subject is a quintessential one for Legaspi during the 1970s up to the 1980s. Of this, Guillermo writes: “Through the Seventies and Eighties, Legaspi produced paintings dealing with universal human themes…These large, heroic canvases convey the surging, straining movements of human beings in aspiration, struggle, and triumph done in his dynamic style. The human figure in its well-articulated muscular and structural frame becomes an eloquent vehicle for expression, while a tension ensues between organic form and geometric structure, transparency, and solidity, the flexible and the inexorable.”<br /><br />“In 1976, he did a number of multi-layered paintings on wood panels to give actual depth and shadows to the illusion of spatial movement,” Guillermo concludes.<br /><br />While the seemingly airy, diaphanous quality of this particular piece exudes an ethereal atmosphere and gives credence to the illusion of movement that is subtle and graceful, a sense of tension is evoked through the chaotic irregularity of the geometric forms in the background. Yet, Legaspi’s application of earthy tones, particularly to the human figures, remains suggestive of a sense of strength and resilience in the midst of turbulence.<br /><br />A greater appreciation of this work can be discerned when contextualized into the grim social conditions of its period: the tumultuous seventies characterized by the hegemony of martial rule and the dictatorship. The three figures seemingly form a coherent whole, struggling and “dancing their way up” to an inviolable showcase of solidarity in the face of an oppressive socio-political order. The work then harks back to Legaspi’s neo-realist beginnings: social commentaries concerning the masses as victims of systemic oppression. (Adrian Maranan","lot_group":"PAINTING","lot_details_html":null,"alias":null,"hp":4000000,"bp":0.2016,"isWithdrawn":0,"accounting_hp":4000000,"userBid":5926,"isPaid":0,"userId":22,"lot_status":"SOLD","isDone":1,"bid_history_id":null,"reserve_price":null,"hammer_price":4806400,"fav":0},"image":[{"id":77,"img_url":"https://leongallery.sgp1.digitaloceanspaces.com/v2/auction/1/1/lot/75.jpg","isFeatured":1}]},"increment":[2200000,2400000,2600000,2800000,3000000,3200000,3400000,3600000,3800000,4000000,4200000,4400000,4600000,4800000,5000000,5500000,6000000,6500000,7000000,7500000,8000000,8500000,9000000,9500000,10000000,11000000,12000000,13000000,14000000,15000000,16000000,17000000,18000000,19000000,20000000],"prev":74,"next":76,"count_bid":0,"bid_history":[],"tokenExpired":1}