{"status":true,"msg":{"data":{"id":1731,"auction_id":3,"set_id":4,"lot_number":"43","artist":"Vicente Manansala (1910 - 1981)","title":"Planting Rice","starting_price":12000000,"signed_dated":"signed and dated 1981 (upper right)","medium":"oil on canvas","size":"26 1/4\" x 33\" (67 cm x 84 cm)","property":"PROPERTY FROM THE CORA RODRIGUEZ COLLECTION","coa":null,"provenance":"Acquired directly from the artist","exhibited":null,"literature":null,"write_up":"A Modernist’s Dialogue with Amorsolo by LISA GUERRERO NAKPIL
\nIf the post-war Manansala was in the orbit of Carlos “Botong” V. Francisco who he met in the newsrooms of the Evening News, and in the following decade, he would fall into the company of the Neo-Realist Hernando R. Ocampo, Manansala would, canvas by canvas, develop a style that was both original and therefore instantly recognizable as his. He would be Manansala, the master of ‘transparent cubism’ and would perhaps be the most sought-after artist of his generation.
He would say that the foundation of an authentic artist would be the ability to draw and would note wryly that he had little respect for the young abstractionists who could not wield a pencil. As a child living in the shanties of Intramuros, he would recount how he would walk barefoot at the age of 5 to cage free art lessons at the University of the Philippines’ School of Fine Arts.
Ironically, in the mid-century, the modernists would go to war with the conservative art hierarchy, the academics who believed in the classic expression of art and who were led by Fernando Amorsolo, then the grand old man of Philippine painting.
Fernando Amorsolo would popularize the myth of the golden Filipino countryside, peopled by beautiful farm girls, gathering mangoes, fetching water, and cooking noonday meals under the blossoming flame trees and rose-streaked skies. Of all of these beloved scenes, the panorama of ‘Planting Rice’ would be the most famous and would inhabit calendars, magazine covers and school books. (Amorsolo’s mentor and uncle would bring home the gold for his masterpiece of the same title at the St Louis World’s Fair in 1904, but it was Amorsolo who would perfect the dream.)
For Manansala to take this theme and make it his own offers the prospect of a delicious dialogue between this avid Neo-Realist — whose name itself spoke of presenting a whole new way of looking at the world — and the ‘Maestro’ Amorsolo.
‘Planting Rice’, painted in 1981, is a commentary on not just the state of Philippine art but also the Filipino condition. Bowed backs, brown hands, heads bent, the Filipino farmer toils knee-deep in the fields, to this day taken for granted and forgotten.","lot_group":"PAINTING","lot_details_html":"
Vicente Manansala (1910 - 1981) Planting Rice signed and dated 1981 (upper right) oil on canvas 26 1/4\" x 33\" (67 cm x 84 cm)