{"status":true,"msg":{"data":{"id":57453,"auction_id":116,"set_id":150,"lot_number":"30","artist":"Anita Magsaysay-Ho (1914 - 2012)","title":"Pounding Rice","starting_price":24000000,"signed_dated":"1947","medium":"egg tempera on board","size":"23\" x 17 1/4\" (58 cm x 44 cm)","property":"PROPERTY OF A DISTINGUISHED LADY","coa":null,"provenance":"Acquired directly from the artist, ca. 1949 - 1950","exhibited":"The Manila Hotel, Anita Magsaysay-Ho: Solo Exhibition, Manila, 26 November - December 1949

The Metropolitan Museum of Manila, Anita Magsaysay-Ho: Isang Pag-Alaala (A Retrospective), Manila, 15 December 1988 - 15 January 1989

Cultural Center of the Philippines, Edades and the 13 Moderns, Manila, 1995

The Metropolitan Museum of Manila, Material Inspirations: Anita Magsaysay-Ho and Nena Saguil. Bonifacio Global City, Taguig, 9 November - 9 December 2024","literature":"Guillermo, Alice G. and Purita Kalaw-Ledesma. Anita Magsaysay-Ho: Isang Pag-Alaala (A Retrospective). Published in conjunction with the exhibition of the same title organized by the Metropolitan Museum of Manila. Manila: A. Magsaysay, Inc., 1988. Full-color illustration and painting description on page 38.

Magsaysay-Ho, Anita. An Artist's Memoirs. Singapore: Anita Magsaysay-Ho and Tien Wah Press, 2000. Full-color illustration and painting description on page 101.

Paras-Perez, Rod. Edades and the 13 Moderns. Published in conjunction with the exhibition of the same title at the Cultural Center of the Philippines in 1995. Manila: Cultural Center of the Philippines with the assistance of the National Commission for Culture and the Arts, 1995. Black-and-white illustration and painting description on page 76.

Roces, Alfredo. Anita Magsaysay-Ho: In Praise of Women (With Annotations on Paintings by Anita Magsaysay-Ho). Pasig City: The Crucible Workshop, 2005. Full-color illustration and painting description on page 224.","write_up":"In December 1949, the widely circulated Sunday Times Magazine presented a three-page feature on Anita Magsaysay-Ho's solo exhibition at the Manila Hotel, where she unveiled, for the first time, her egg tempera masterpieces. Headlined \"Versatile Artist: Painter of modern school turns back to the classic,\" the article highlights Anita's mastery of the age-old medium of mixing fresh egg yolk with powdered pigment and some water, and whose exact origins are shrouded in uncertainty (some historical anecdotes point out to ancient Egypt), but certainly gained widespread reputation and usage in the Renaissance, perfected by the likes of Fra Angelico, Botticelli, Mantegna, Ghirlandaio, Michelangelo, and Raphael.

\"Strangely enough, it is not as an oil artist that [Anita] has won her reputation,\" the article wrote. \"The latest artist to create a furor in local painting circles, she is the most popular and most consistent user of a painting medium that has preserved many a Botticelli canvas.\"

The article noted that \"many of her best [works] were done in egg tempera, which she has been employing throughout the years that she perfected the conservative style and moved on to join the moderns.\"

With egg tempera, Anita stood out amid a male-dominated field, liberating herself and exalting the unbridled glory of the Filipina in the process.

Anita's second egg tempera masterwork

One of the works in the Manila Hotel show was Pounding Rice. Anita wrote in her memoirs that this was the second egg tempera painting she did during her studies at Michigan's Cranbrook Academy of Art, where she honed her dexterity in egg tempera under the academy's director at the time, Zoltan Sepeshy. Sepeshy, who was educated in Budapest's Royal Academy of Art and then in Vienna's Academy of Fine Arts, published an instructional volume titled Tempera Painting in 1946, which Anita likely exhausted as a reference.

One of the most published and exhibited Anitas

Pounding Rice was first showcased to the Philippine public in the 1949 Manila Hotel exhibition. It would next be presented in Anita's 1988 retrospective at Manila’s Metropolitan Museum titled Isang Pag-Alaala and again in the 1995 retrospective on Philippine modernism at the CCP titled Edades and the 13 Moderns. Pounding Rice staged its comeback at the Met in the show Material Inspirations: Anita Magsaysay-Ho and Nena Saguil, celebrating the 110th birth anniversary of the two foremost Filipina modernists and their landmark debut at the 60th Venice Biennale, six decades after the Philippines first participated.

The work appears in full-color photographs in Anita's 2000 memoirs; Alfredo Roces' In Praise of Women, the most authoritative monograph on Anita's artistic journey; and the exhibition catalogs of the Anita and the CCP retrospectives.

Pounding Rice is also captured in a rare photograph of Anita, captioned in the catalog of the 1988 Met retrospective as \"Artist's Studio, Cranbrook Academy of Art, Bloomfield Hills, Michigan.\" The work appears beside a seated Anita, laid out on an easel alongside a boceto of Water Carriers, which would become Anita's third egg tempera work and was recently auctioned in León Gallery last June for more than P60 million.

Pounding Rice, where Anita found her distinct Modernist style

Interestingly, Pounding Rice marked the genesis of Anita's style: exaggerated figures of women with long, protruding necks and angular and often robust bodies that exude exciting tension.

Anita said to Roces in an interview published in his monograph on her, \"In Cranbrook, my first egg tempera was...The Gleaners. [Sepeshy] looked at it and said, 'Well, this is a good painting, but it's too graphic. There is no excitement. Everything is correct. You think of something that is different.'\"

Sepeshy specifically instructed Anita to paint her next work \"in a more exciting way, something with movement.\"

Anita then said, \"I thought to myself, what will I do? So, I said, maybe I will just paint women...I am a woman, and I know how I will do this [swings her body in a pose]. So, that's how I started on the subject of women in awkward movements. I was striving for a certain tension.\"

Roces wrote that Anita learned from Sepeshy \"the need for imagination and free interpretation of lines and shapes to create interest and counterpoint in place of faithful rendering of anatomy.\"

\"In my next work, I did a scene of two women pounding rice....I exaggerated [their] positions and gestures. Mr. Sepeshy was pleased with this,\" Anita recalled in her memoirs.

Pounding Rice sees Anita completely exorcised of the Amorsolo influence on classical views on anatomy and overall composition. The women are depicted in “gracefully awkward” positions. Varying shades of brown complemented by blues and greys are accentuated by Anita's delicate, cross-hatched strokes, which give the painting a luminous effect, seemingly lighting the painting from within. In one of her notes, Anita indicates the mixing of “five values for each color you plan to use, ranging from dark to very light.” Anita also prescribes the use of sable brushes, which she says “are a must,” and housepainter brushes of hair “for textural effects.”

Anita put more detail into this work than Water Carriers, exemplified by the additional figures in the background: a mother carrying a bilao on her head and accompanied by her little daughter and a man helming his carabao-drawn carretela. The eyes of the three women in the foreground are also much more delineated.

Anita said in the Roces book, \"This is really my favorite medium. I like egg tempera because you can get a transparency not possible in oil. You can do dry brush with color. You can scrape off the paint until you reach the white of the board itself. The brushwork gives the painting a certain transparency...Details are easy to put in.\"

Even in the presence of commercially prepared gesso boards and dry pigments and ready-made egg tempera emulsions, Anita—encouraged by Sepeshy—chose to do it the old-fashioned way. \"I had to prepare the boards myself,\" Anita said. \"Sepeshy required us to prime the boards with nineteen layers. The finish was as smooth as glass...I bought so many pigments and ground them myself, like Diego de Rivera.\"Pounding Rice, where Anita started painting women

Sepeshy was pleased upon seeing the dynamic scene of two women pounding rice, and from then on, Anita embraced and championed the everyday Filipina in her art.

Pounding Rice, according to Anita, captures the origins of her passion for solely painting women, tracing its inspiration to her childhood summers in Zambales.

\"I experienced pounding rice as a child of 10 or 11 in Zambales,\" Anita writes in her annotations to Pounding Rice in Roces' monograph. \"I remember the jerking movements of the women, especially at the waist, stomach, and foot, as they lifted the pestle up and down to pound the rice. When I asked the women if I could try it, they were amused, but they let me anyway.\"

Sepeshy had this principle that it is \"the artist's responsibility...to look forward, not backward.\" But Anita had other things in mind; she looked back and culled from her childhood memories.

\"When [Sepeshy] asked me to put more gesture in my work, I remembered how I loved to watch and listen to the sounds of rice being pounded. I even tried it once,\" Anita noted in her memoirs.

The rural life profoundly impacted Anita as a child. The Zambales women whom Anita witnessed in their dignified labor and proud joy in their everyday communal endeavors became her art's driving force.

In retrospect, Anita would write in her memoirs how thankful she was to her parents for bringing their family to Zambales every summer. \"These scenes of my childhood are so vivid in my mind, [like] women pounding rice....Had I never holidayed in Zambales, I do not think I would have the depth of impressions, which I subconsciously draw upon with so much fondness and passion when I paint.\"

One of Anita’s favorite paintings

Pounding Rice was acquired by one of Anita's dear friends, whom she had known since the 1940s through the Manila Times, then the country's leading daily. Anita's friend works as a staffer \"who had the confidence of Don Chino Roces.\" The painting is currently in her son's care, who recalls that Anita said Pounding Rice is one of her favorite works, alongside Water Carriers and Laughter (Purita Kalaw - Ledesma collection). He recalls his “Tita Anita” saying that these works were her “first real paintings that showed her innate empathy for ordinary working farm women, and how she strove to show their dignity and joy in communal labor.” “They were part of her childhood memories, and she wanted to capture how women worked together but in a happy and concerted way,” he added.

As Pounding Rice was one of Anita's favorites, it had always been included in exhibitions mounted in honor of her.

Anita's deep gratitude to Cranbrook

Beyond the beauty of Anita's reminiscences lies Cranbrook. Within its idyllic environs, Anita found a way to reconnect with her childhood recollections of the pastoral.Life at Cranbrook was easy-breezy. Brimming with verdant woods, lush greenery, and surrounded by lakes and streams, students would often say of Cranbrook as \"living in a design storybook.\" In Anita's batch, there were only 20 painting students previously chosen from the meticulous deliberation, and only a further 80 were accepted into the other art fields: architecture, sculpture, weaving, and potteryAnita had fond recollections of Cranbrook, writing in her memoirs, \"My dorm was very modern...I had a cubbyhole to myself, like all the other artists. I loved to paint the whole day until 11 PM while listening to classical music played outside in the gardens....\"

Indeed, Cranbrook was an artist's utopia, where one's creative soul could be stimulated and one's untapped potential could be emancipated Thanks to Cranbrook, egg tempera instantly became Anita's favorite, notwithstanding its unforgiving process; it dries quickly, making no room for mistakes. In her notes, Anita first draws the figures “lightly in pencil on toned paper,” crosshatching “dark lines in black ink and light areas in white watercolor.” She says that this “preliminary composition is the final composition.” Anita then traces the figures on a training paper placed over the original drawing. She would then prepare homemade carbon paper “by covering the surface of a second piece of tracing paper with the scribbling of a soft pencil.” Anita would place the carbon paper between the gesso board and the first training paper and redraw the figures, “thus transferring the drawing into the panel,” she said. The next step would be the coloring process.

\"Working on egg tempera was absorbing,” Anita wrote. You become totally engrossed in the process. You lose yourself while working. Time does not exist. Cranbrook provided that peace and quiet an artist needs.\" Cranbrook was heaven, so much so that Anita found herself daydreaming even five decades after her studies. Anita wrote, \"Sometimes, I wished I would wake up and find myself in Cranbrook again, for Cranbrook was indeed a beautiful, serene place for artists to study and to learn.\"

Anita found solace in her memories of the pastoral and Cranbrook's utopia. As such, memory became the wellspring for Anita's paintings, transforming them into liberating introspections. Much like her egg tempera works that seemingly glow from within, Anita’s is an art that sprang from the depths of her evocations.

\"I just treasure my memories of Cranbrook—a place that gave me joy, and where I learned how to paint in the medium that I love best,\" Anita concluded.","lot_group":"PAINTING","lot_details_html":null,"alias":null,"hp":54000000,"bp":0.2016,"isWithdrawn":0,"accounting_hp":54000000,"userBid":null,"isPaid":0,"userId":22,"lot_status":"SOLD","isDone":1,"bid_history_id":null,"reserve_price":0,"hammer_price":64886400,"fav":0},"image":[{"id":61942,"img_url":"https://leongallery.sgp1.digitaloceanspaces.com/v2/auction/116/150/lot/30.jpg","isFeatured":1}]},"increment":[],"prev":29,"next":31,"count_bid":0,"bid_history":[],"tokenExpired":1}