{"status":true,"msg":{"data":{"id":60838,"auction_id":203,"set_id":236,"lot_number":"127","artist":"Nena Saguil (1914 - 1994)","title":"Sans Titre (Untitled)","starting_price":1000000,"signed_dated":"signed and dated 1991 (lower right)","medium":"oil on canvas","size":"30\" x 32 1/2\" (76 cm x 83 cm)","property":null,"coa":null,"provenance":"Private collection, Manila","exhibited":null,"literature":null,"write_up":"Simplicia “Nena” Laconico Saguil (1914 - 1994) — woman, modernist artist, insider of the ‘Philippine Art Gallery Group’, and then a member of the École de Paris — may very well, through her life and work, trace the dizzying trajectory of Philippine art. <br/><br/> In an interview in 1950, on the eve of her first solo exhibition at the Manila Hotel and under the auspices of the influential Art Association of the Philippines, she would reveal a familial connection to Juan Luna, referring to herself as “a niece” to the country’s most internationally accomplished and bemedalled artist, then as now. <br/><br/> She began her formal training 20 years before in the School of Fine Arts of the University of the Philippines, learning to paint at the feet of the classical painters, the heirs to Juan Luna and Resurreccion Hidalgo, none other than Fabian de la Rosa and Fernando Amorsolo. <br/><br/> Serendipitously, Nena had one bright-eyed female classmate at the University of the Philippines — Anita Magsaysay, who was just a few months older than her.  <br/><br/> Saguil and Anita would both find themselves standing at the edge of the smoking volcano of Filipino art. Anita, pedigreed and patrician, would be the first decamp to attend the avant-garde Cranbrook Academy of Art in the United States. Nena, on the other hand, would seek employment as an illustrator at the Tribune, a leading Manila newspaper at the time. No doubt this is where she would meet her future modernist confederates, including Hernando R. Ocampo and Lyd Arguilla, who would found the Neo-Realist movement and the Philippine Art Gallery, respectively, and in such quick succession that they would inevitably merge. <br/><br/> In fact, Nena would be one of the female triumvirate of the time: Lyd Arguilla, who founded the PAG, the prize-winning Anita Magsaysay-Ho, and herself. At the Philippine Art Gallery, she reigned as ‘Secretary-Treasurer’ from 1952 to 1954. Lyd Arguilla carried the democratic title of ‘MemberAt-Large.’ <br/><br/> Saguil would try all manner of experimentation, and in the Sixties began creating shaped canvases. A friend from the PAG years, Nati Nuguid, would write, “A couple of oils done in ovals of canvas represent the artist’s experiments in freeing herself from convention. “Must paintings always be rectangular?” Saguil asks. <br/><br/> French art critic, Ernest Fraenckel, would write of her, “Saguil does not stop there, but ascends higher, into the region of geometric and numerical essences, into the workshops which meditate on possible worlds, beautiful and grandiose, or filigreed and similar to fine, openwork fabrics. We see the birth of nervous systems and stars, the slow condensation of clouds, the emergence of submarine mysteries detaching themselves from a bottomless twilight; we feel the permanent vibration of the Great Force that feeds all this, and we see the limitless shining through, shattering all frames.”<br/><br/>  He continued, “The frame of a painting has only a very relative meaning for Nena Saguil. It is, rather, a window than a border delimiting the content of the painted work, a window that allows one to see a part of it, and to glimpse, further away, an immensity whose extent it would be vain to try to estimate.” <br/><br/> The work at hand is, in essence, just that window whose edges blur the past and the present: a memory of a summer in the French countryside, with the golden colors of flowers and bright blue skies. It is whimsical and painted with a light hand, capturing the soft wind that might be moving across a field and pushing past clouds. The rare, shaped canvas adds to the atmosphere of playfulness, offering a view into lost serenity and the yearning for a happy dream just beyond the horizon.<br/><br/> “This is the will of Nena Saguil,” Fraenkel would declare, “to travel in the universes and among the beings that populate them, to receive and give joy, to marvel and communicate her wonder to others, and thus to forge friendships—fleeting if there is nothing more to hope for, but permanent and solid where possible.”","lot_group":"PAINTING","lot_details_html":null,"alias":null,"hp":1600000,"bp":0.2016,"isWithdrawn":0,"accounting_hp":1600000,"userBid":34,"isPaid":0,"userId":34,"lot_status":"SOLD","isDone":1,"bid_history_id":19891,"reserve_price":0,"hammer_price":1922560,"fav":0},"image":[{"id":66853,"img_url":"https://leongallery.sgp1.digitaloceanspaces.com/v2/auction/203/236/lot/127.jpg","isFeatured":1}]},"increment":[900000,1000000,1100000,1200000,1300000,1400000,1500000,1600000,1700000,1800000,1900000,2000000,2200000,2400000,2600000,2800000,3000000,3200000,3400000,3600000,3800000,4000000,4200000,4400000,4600000,4800000,5000000,5500000,6000000,6500000,7000000,7500000,8000000,8500000,9000000,9500000,10000000,11000000,12000000,13000000,14000000,15000000,16000000,17000000,18000000,19000000,20000000],"prev":126,"next":128,"count_bid":0,"bid_history":[],"tokenExpired":1}