{"status":true,"msg":{"data":{"id":61600,"auction_id":209,"set_id":242,"lot_number":"22","artist":"Vicente Manansala (1910 - 1981)","title":"Intramuros","starting_price":2400000,"signed_dated":"signed and dated 1959 (upper right)","medium":"mixed media on canvas","size":"26 1/4\" x 27 1/2\" (67 cm x 70 cm)","property":"PROPERTY FROM THE DON J. ANTONIO ARANETA COLLECTION","coa":null,"provenance":null,"exhibited":null,"literature":"
\n Araneta, Antonio S., ed., 1030 R. Hidalgo: Volume II, Legacy in Art. Manila: Mara, Inc., 1986. Full-color reproduction and painting description on page 97.","write_up":"Vicente Manansala once called Intramuros his home. When he was four years old, the Manansala family moved to the walled city from their home in Macabebe, Pampanga, settling in an accesoria on Calle Real. His neighbors and playmates were also future artists: the sculptor Jose Alcantara (who lived next door), painter Antonio Dumlao, and lyric soprano Elsa Aenelle, the daughter of the owner of the house the Manansala family was renting.

As a young boy, Manansala played and frolicked atop the centuries-old walls of the former capital, treating them as if those bulwarks and ramparts were waves to be adventurously surfed and rode on.

Rod. Paras-Perez wrote in his book on Manansala: \"A happy afternoon meant walking atop the beveled fence of the San Agustin Church. Or making his own toys because he was too poor to buy any. He made his kites and flew them on top of the muelle de la muralla.\"

It was also in Intramuros where Manansala early on experienced the toils of earning a living; he became a bootblack, a newsboy, a caddy, and a distributor of programs at movie houses. Growing up experiencing these hardships, Manansala became a feisty boy who, in the words of Paras-Perez, \"preferred to do the bullying rather than be bullied.\" Ultimately, Manansala became an alpha male of the block.

The Intramuros of the American colonial era was not the same Intramuros of the old Spanish empire. It was already stripped of its former glory, slowly deteriorating, as the nucleus of government, businesses, and social activities had already moved to Downtown Manila and the posh districts of Ermita, Malate, San Miguel, and Santa Ana. It was a sharp contrast against the backdrop of the new and modernized Manila that America had envisioned, the old walls and fortresses whispering the might of an oldworld empire and the toiling of the seven churches' bells reminding the brethren of their Hispanic identity, eclipsed by the shadows of rapid Americanization. Intramuros had become accessible—and now, home—to the common people, the masa, who were once denigrated as indios and barred from unlimited access to the old city.

Thanks to his spunky Intramuros years, Manansala learned to fight and fend for himself. Once, he worked as a mess boy in 1934 aboard an English ship named Silver Palm. The assistant steward, a bulky Australian, exploited and overworked him. Fed up, Manansala punched him with such force in the groin. When the ship docked at San Francisco, California, Manansala went to the famed Piccadilly Circus to have some time off. When a \"scarfaced Filipino toughie\" forced Manansala to pay for the former's entertainment services (he was a circus dancer), the latter thrashed the toughie, who was eventually thrown out of the circus with the help of three Filipino bouncers, all of whom were Manansala's old friends-slash-hood mates in Intramuros.

It was also in Intramuros that Manansala first discovered his love for art. Wrote This Week Magazine in a September 1958 article titled 'Manansala: The Man and his Work': \"At the age of seven, he was already drawing cockroaches, dragonflies, and June bugs. All through the elementary grades, he and Dumlao…walked barefoot to the U.P. Bellas Artes on R. Hidalgo for free art lessons.\" Manansala fiddled with his imagination and unleashed his raw creativity by making his own toys since they did not have enough to buy even a few.

Manansala's fondness for Intramuros never seemed to falter even after he had already moved out of the old city, as if staying true to the title once conferred to it by the King of Spain: Insigne y siempre leal—Distinguished and Most Loyal City.

After Intramuros was razed to the ground by the combined forces of Japanese and American indiscriminate artillery firing during the Battle of Manila, barung-barongs or shanty houses rose from the ground. Intramuros became known as a shanty town, peopled by the helpless populace who sought immediate relief and shelter from the ravages and trauma of the war.

In this 1959 painting depicting the war-torn and desolate ruins of Intramuros, images of the barung-barong and the destroyed walls are rendered in an abstract expressionist manner, with the subject coming off as close to calligraphic transcriptions of reality. When Manansala painted this work, he had become the most prolific painter in the Philippines, with the highly popular This Week Magazine honoring him as the country's most outstanding painter, being chosen by a board of judges composed of artists, critics, and collectors, including president and founder of the influential Art Association of the Philippines (AAP) Purita Kalaw-Ledesma, then-UP Fine Arts dean Dominador Castañeda, legendary architect and first-generation art collector Don Luis Araneta, and then-UST Fine Arts dean.

Victorio Edades. Manansala had just entered the prime years of his career as an artist, having won top prizes at the annual AAP competitions and even in international exhibitions, specifically the major award for \"Best Philippine Entry\" for his painting \"Musikero\" at the 2nd SpanishAmerican Biennial in Cuba in 1953.

Intramuros is also an experimental Manansala work, with the artist chaotically integrating cement to the canvas, as if mimicking the war-torn walls of Intramuros and the degraded environment and desolate atmosphere of the once glorious city, a city that was left to succumb to a grave dishonor.

Manansala was the first Filipino artist to treat the barungbarong as a potent subject. Wrote This Week: \"After the war, he worked as a staff artist of the Evening News and lived in the slums of Reina Regente [in Binondo], among the barong-barongs of the squatters. It was here that he got the idea for his barong-barong paintings, which started a trend in Philippine painting.\"

Here, Manansala presents a tension-filled compactness, in which the barong-barongs and the ruined walls of Intramuros are tightly interwoven through interlocked planes and a color palette limited to browns and greys. As if Manansala was saying that the barung-barong has now become the sole identity of the Intramuros that he once knew: a bleak landscape bearing the brunt of the brutal Battle of Manila. It can be said that this 1959 painting can be one of the settings of his seminal 1950 work, \"Madonna of the Slums.\"

Manansala's earlier iterations of his barung-barong gave him several significant nods, including First Prize for \"Barung-barong No. 1\" and Honorable Mention for \"Barung-barong No. 2\" at the Manila Grand Opera House Exhibition for the Art Association of the Philippines in 1950.

The work at hand follows a similar trajectory; it captures Manansala at the peak of his powers, showcasing his profound ability for creative introspection and the artistic intensity that he exudes, which appeals to both the senses and the mind, while knowing how to maintain restraint to deliver his message and capture just the right feeling easily.","lot_group":"PAINTING","lot_details_html":null,"alias":null,"hp":4400000,"bp":0.2016,"isWithdrawn":0,"accounting_hp":4400000,"userBid":34,"isPaid":0,"userId":34,"lot_status":"SOLD","isDone":1,"bid_history_id":24748,"reserve_price":0,"hammer_price":5287040,"fav":0},"image":[{"id":68501,"img_url":"https://leongallery.sgp1.digitaloceanspaces.com/v2/auction/209/242/lot/22.jpg","isFeatured":1},{"id":68973,"img_url":"https://leongallery.sgp1.digitaloceanspaces.com/v2/auction/209/242/lot/22a.jpg","isFeatured":0},{"id":68961,"img_url":"https://leongallery.sgp1.digitaloceanspaces.com/v2/auction/209/242/lot/22b.jpg","isFeatured":0},{"id":68960,"img_url":"https://leongallery.sgp1.digitaloceanspaces.com/v2/auction/209/242/lot/22c.jpg","isFeatured":0}]},"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":21,"next":23,"count_bid":0,"bid_history":[],"tokenExpired":1}