{"status":true,"msg":{"data":{"id":22214,"auction_id":24,"set_id":43,"lot_number":"123","artist":"Hernando R. Ocampo (1911 - 1978)","title":"Pastoral","starting_price":3000000,"signed_dated":"signed (lower right) ca. 1930","medium":"oil on canvas","size":"20\" x 24\" (74 cm x 61 cm)","property":null,"coa":null,"provenance":"Acquired directly from the Artist and thence by descent","exhibited":null,"literature":"Jaime Laya, “From Inspiration to Reality : \nThe Cultural Center Curtain”, from Wala Lang, \nManila Bulletin, May 10, 2021. Illustrated in color.","write_up":"In this distinctively Filipino Pastoral is found the unmistakable intersection of two important nationalists’ lives.
\nThe first was the statesman Lorenzo Martinez Tanada (1898-1992) who was witness to the Philippines’\npolitical milestones, born at the twilight\nof the Spanish empire, raised through American rule\nand an architect of the end of the Marcos regime.
\nTañada was a fiscal of the city of Manila in 1929\nand a founder of the Civil Liberties Union of the\nPhilippines, fighting for workers’ rights and their\nfreedom of speech. He was next part of the\nguerrilla group “Free Philippines” during World War II;\nand wrote in an underground newspaper during the\nJapanese occupation. He became a judge in post-war\nManila and presided in the Filipino People’s Court\nthat tried collaborators.
\nIn 1947, Tañada ran for the Senate and topped the\nelection. He ran successfully four more times in 1953,\n1959 and 1965. He helped secure the release of Ninoy\nAquino in 1980 and began the clamor against the\nU.S. Bases in 1983.
\nHernando R. Ocampo (1911-1978) was, on the other\nhand, was born in Sta. Cruz, Manila. He drifted from\na year at the Letran law school to the Commerce\ndepartment of FEU, winding up in the creative writing\nclass of Manuel Arguilla, and becoming a self-taught\npainter, becoming after the War, the ringleader of the\navant-garde group called the Neo-Expressionists.
\nH.R. had an enormously colorful life, seemingly the\nopposite of the venerable Lorenzo ‘Tanny’ Tañada.\nH.R. started life as a 12-year old shoeshine boy, then\na gopher, finally a cashier at the Maypajo Cabaret\nin Caloocan. He worked at the Philippine Education\nCompany (PECO) and became associate editor for\nthe Herald newspaper’s Mid-Week Magazine in 1938.
\nTañada’s life was just as swashbuckling. He, too, ran\nin the same journalistic and artistic circles that\nfeatured not just H.R. Ocampo but also Lyd Arguilla\n(founder of the Philippine Art Gallery and Manuel’s\nwidow), as well as Vicente Manansala and the other\nPAG stalwarts. This would have been the moment\nwhen the work may have changed hands as either\na gift or a happy purchase; in either case, it was\na meaningful gesture of friendship.
\nIn Pastoral, the mystic Mt. Banahaw looms, a peaceful\nblue shrouded in clouds, hiding the fact that it is an\nextinct volcano. Beneath it is a bucolic scene of twin\nnipa huts, symmetrical with a pair of coconut palms.\nTwo women wash their laundry in a small pond; a\nline of colorful clothes dries near their home. Is it an\naccident that H.R. depicts a scene with which Tañada\nwould have been keenly familiar? Tanny, after all,\nwas born and grew up in Quezon province where\nMt. Banahaw guards its boundaries. It’s a memento\nof the golden days before the War.
\nH.R. was arrested on trumped-up charges in 1945,\nfalsely accused of being a collaborator. (A jealous\nboyfriend had caught him kissing his girl, so the story\ngoes.) He was let off and never actually came before\nthe war crimes court that Tañada ran. One wonders\nwhat would have happened if he had.
\nHe would emerge from that false imprisonment a\nfriend of Claro M. Recto and would eventually join\nhis braintrust. Tañada would eventually run as Recto’s\nvice-president in 1957. The three men intersected\nin an agenda that was pro-people, pro-poor and\nanti-imperialist.
\nJaime Laya deems it, “The earliest Ocampo work I\nknow,” and continues, “is in the Amorsolo tradition.\nWriting in his opinion column, Wala Lang in the\nManila Bulletin (May 12, 2021), he notes, “Entitled\nPastoral, it is a typical landscape but literally in a\ndifferent light. His later work continued to be inherently\nrepresentational but seen through shifting lenses. It\nis a remarkable progression, from representational\nthat over five decades became almost—just\nalmost—abstract.”
\nPastoral thus remains a reminder of the friendship\nbetween two men, giants in each of their spheres.","lot_group":"PAINTING","lot_details_html":"
Hernando R. Ocampo (1911 - 1978) Pastoral signed (lower right) ca. 1930 oil on canvas 20\" x 24\" (74 cm x 61 cm)