{"status":true,"msg":{"data":{"id":58417,"auction_id":121,"set_id":155,"lot_number":"55","artist":"Hernando R. Ocampo (1911 - 1978)","title":"Kalaanan","starting_price":12000000,"signed_dated":"signed and dated 1968 (lower right)","medium":"oil on canvas","size":"30\" x 40\" (76 cm x 102 cm)","property":"PROPERTY FROM THE NIKKI COSETENG COLLECTION","coa":null,"provenance":null,"exhibited":"The Luz Gallery, Legaspi - Luz - Ocampo (Three-man Exhibit), Makati, 7 –\n19 November 1968

León Gallery, Trove: The Coseteng Collection, The Life and Art of H.R. Ocampo, Makati City, 21 January 2017","literature":"De Jesus, Angel G. H.R. Ocampo: The Artist as Filipino. Manila: Heritage Publishing, 1979. Black-and-white illustration and painting description on page 150.

Villegas, Ramon N. and Lisa Guerrero Nakpil. Trove: The Coseteng\nCollection, The Life and Art of H.R. Ocampo. Published to accompany the exhibition of the same title at León Gallery on 21 January 2017. Makati City: León Gallery, 2017. Full-color spread on pages 72 - 73 and painting description on pages 70, 72.

Hufana, Alejandrino G., ed. Pamana 13 June 1974: A Cultural Quarterly Published by the Cultural Center of the Philippines. Manila: Cultural Center of the Philippines, 1974. Listed on page 19 as “274. KALAANAN” under the artist's list of paintings.

Tiongson, Nicanor G., ed. Artista ng Bayan 1991. Cultural Center of the Philippines. Manila. 1991. Listed on page 37 as \"274. Kalaanan\" under HR Ocampo's \"List of Paintings (Partial)\".","write_up":"Kalaanan, symbolizing the middle-aged Ocampo's embrace of full-time painting

Hernando R. Ocampo's Kalaanan represents a pivotal transformation in his storied life and professional career. Painted in the year Ocampo retired from advertising work and devoted himself to fulltime painting, Kalaanan encapsulates an artist finally lifting the lifelong burden of bureaucratic trade to support his large family, as his art had not been able to sustain the everyday needs of his extended household for the longest time.

Ocampo had been working in the media industry since the pre-war era, starting as an Associate Editor for the Herald Mid-Week Magazine from 1938 to 1941. During the war, he would become Chief Scriptwriter and Assistant Director of the Associated Artists, the producer of stage shows at the famed Lyric, Capitol, and Avenue Theaters in Manila. In the post-war period, Ocampo would go from strength to strength in the industry, reaching the pinnacle of his professional career as a formidable media man when he became Senior Vice President of Philippine Promotions, Inc. (PhilProm), the pioneering Filipino ad agency established by Pete Teodoro in 1945. Ocampo was entrusted with this position due to his solid four-year experience (1954-1958) as Director of the state-owned National Media Production Center, the precursor to the People's Television Network and the Presidential Broadcast Service.

However, by 1968, Ocampo felt that his retirement plans had finally come to fruition. \"I thought it would be wise to retire while my eyesight is still in good shape,\" Ocampo playfully yet seriously said to Eric Torres in a May 3, 1968 interview with The Manila Times.

Ocampo felt that his years of corporate work had already spared him and his family from financial hardship, having saved enough money to finally focus on painting and get those hardened brushes and dusty canvases to do their painterly symphonies again.

Torres noted in the same interview article, \"Ocampo used to say that he would quit a profitable career in mass media as soon as he had stashed enough savings in the bank to go broke for art's sake without fear of impoverishing his family for the next several years. Last month, he thought he had banked enough to give himself that freedom from economic problems, which serious artists dream about, but only less than a handful in this country are able to realize.” Torres further noted, \"The timing of Ocampo's retirement could not have been better… Whereas in the early '50s it was difficult to sell an Ocampo at P300, today Ocampos are being bought by collectors at a faster rate and at higher prices (from P1,500 to P5,000).”

It should be noted that before his retirement, Ocampo would only paint on Sundays. Ocampo's retirement coincided with his 57th birthday. With 50 being a golden year and 7 a lucky number, Ocampo's decision to devote himself to full-time painting could not be more providential, as this would also mark the beginning of what is inarguably his most iconic artistic era, the Visual Melody Period of pure, lyrical paintings combining the lush tropicality of colors with the intimacy of chamber music.

Speaking in an interview in 1961, Ocampo “resolved to devote more time to painting again.” Turning 50 that year, the Art Association of the Philippines honored him with a retrospective.

One of the featured works in Ocampo's comeback exhibition

Kalaanan became one of those paintings Ocampo created during this period of creative revitalization. The work would be at a landmark Luz Gallery show in late 1968, joining forces with fellow modernist friends Cesar Legaspi and Arturo Luz. Titled Legaspi, Luz, Ocampo, it was the latter's first exhibition of new, major works since 1961.

Ocampo's latest paintings were well-received by critics, with Alfredo Roces writing that the return to full-time painting resulted in \"exhilarating\" works, \"alive with glowing colors and newfound energy.\" Remarkably, several of Ocampo's paintings in the exhibition were based on Caloocan's various districts, serving as homage to his hometown.

Ocampo's inspiration for the work

A well-documented work appearing in both of Ocampo's official list of paintings and his most authoritative monograph to date, written by a fellow writer and friend, Angel G. de Jesus, Kalaanan refers to the old name of what is now Caloocan's Grace Park, which is divided into western and eastern districts, with the former bordering the city's población. Notably, the new Caloocan City Hall, completed in 2017, is located in Grace Park East. 10th Avenue, also in Grace Park East, is frequented for its heavy concentration of motorcycle dealers and shops selling motorcycle parts and accessories, most notably Tres Hermanas Motors, which has been in existence since 1978.

According to local traditions, Kalaanan is the name given to this Caloocan district since it was a land granted (from the Tagalog root word laan meaning allocate) to anyone who wished to settle in this area. The Caloocan Historical Data Papers of the National Library of the Philippines tells of the legendary origins of Kalaanan.

\"The word \"CALAANAN\" literally means a wild tract of wild land. This barrio originated during the Spanish period.\" The papers would then tell of the legendary King Kalaan, who was the bravest of the kings of old Caloocan and \"waged wars against other kings to expand his domain.”

The paper continues, \"King Kalaan was also kind and generous. When he grew old, his territory became a little town called CALAANAN. Since then, Filipinos and Spaniards alike called the place Calaanan, the word derived from the name of the King and the word meaning territorial wideness.\"

Historically, during the American colonial period, Calaanan's name was changed to Grace Park (mainly due to the lobbying of Don Toribio Teodoro of Ang Tibay fame) in honor of Grace Roosevelt, the sole daughter of then-American Governor-General Theodore Roosevelt, Jr., the eldest son of US president Teddy Roosevelt. Grace was said to be \"very much attracted to the approximity [sic] of the place to Malacañan and the cool breeze beaming from the vast grassy plateau of Caloocan.”

Kalaanan, now Grace Park, would undergo rapid development, spurred by the 1935 inauguration of the Grace Park Airfield, Manila's first civilian airport. It was designed in the New York City-inspired grid urban plan that was intended for real estate and industrial developments. Grace Park's 5th Avenue became a hub of the footwear industry, led by the famed and internationally exported Ang Tibay leather shoes and slippers, and its iconic Art Decostyle factory, which was once Asia's premier shoe factory. Its founder, influential industrialist Don Toribio Teodoro, was also born in Grace Park and would acquire the iconic Manila Grand Opera House during the war. Other shoe factories on 5th Avenue included Jacinto Rubber Shoes and El Porvenir (Elpo) Rubber Shoes, owned by Don Tomas Geronimo, who pioneered rubber shoe manufacturing in the country.

Grace Park remains a major commercial center of Caloocan.

Representing a return to form

The scintillating greens of Kalaanan capture the district's prime position as an economic lifeblood of Ocampo's beloved Caloocan. Contrasted with the somber and often disorienting palette of Ocampo's preceding Mutants Period, which spoke to the era's nuclear anxieties, his colors now seem \"singing\": luscious, warm, and sensual, resonating with the artist's newfound freedom.

Kalaanan represents an emancipated Ocampo. Borrowing from the barrio legend of how Kalaanan got its name, the work resonates with Ocampo exalting his cherished Caloocan, dedicating an entire body of work symbolizing his elated return to painting, his own cherie amour. Caloocan was where Ocampo first experienced the searing realities of life, early on putting a heavy burden upon his juvenile shoulders as he went on the streets polishing the shoes of the nearby Maypajo and Lerma cabarets’ local and foreign customers, and later on working in the former as a cashier, regularly encountering rowdy American soldiers and sailors being beaten up by the local gangsters. When he started to become a writer before the war struck, Ocampo wrote two short stories dedicated to Maypajo and its people—“The Legend of Maypajo” and “Street Scene in Maypajo”—his own locality in Caloocan and the district southwest of Grace Park.

The city would become the silent witness to all his vocational frustrations, familial struggles, his profound empathy for the working class manifested in his stories and early paintings, the regrets brought by the abandonment of dreams to study abroad just to prioritize his family’s immediate everyday needs (Ocampo was the original grantee of the 1950 French government scholarship that ultimately went to his friend, Manansala), and the little triumphs as he forged his dreams of pursuing his soul's creative passion into a fully realized truth. Once the target of vile criticisms for his compellingly original and daring blend of form and color, Ocampo is now celebrated for his oeuvre, which harmonizes with and is attuned to the agitating desires of a people towards the reclamation of agency, identity, and autonomy in a discordant, post-colonial society.","lot_group":"PAINTING","lot_details_html":null,"alias":null,"hp":15000000,"bp":0.2016,"isWithdrawn":0,"accounting_hp":15000000,"userBid":null,"isPaid":0,"userId":22,"lot_status":"SOLD","isDone":1,"bid_history_id":null,"reserve_price":0,"hammer_price":18024000,"fav":0},"image":[{"id":63679,"img_url":"https://leongallery.sgp1.digitaloceanspaces.com/v2/auction/121/155/lot/55.jpg","isFeatured":1},{"id":63910,"img_url":"https://leongallery.sgp1.digitaloceanspaces.com/v2/auction/121/155/lot/55a.jpg","isFeatured":0},{"id":63907,"img_url":"https://leongallery.sgp1.digitaloceanspaces.com/v2/auction/121/155/lot/55b.jpg","isFeatured":0}]},"increment":[11000000,12000000,13000000,14000000,15000000,16000000,17000000,18000000,19000000,20000000],"prev":54,"next":56,"count_bid":0,"bid_history":[],"tokenExpired":1}