{"status":true,"msg":{"data":{"id":36877,"auction_id":46,"set_id":74,"lot_number":"63","artist":"Carlos “Botong” Francisco (1912 - 1969)","title":"Untitled","starting_price":3000000,"signed_dated":"signed (lower right)","medium":"oil on board","size":"17”x 22” (43 cm x 56 cm)","property":null,"coa":null,"provenance":null,"exhibited":null,"literature":null,"write_up":"Botong visually safeguards a natural world of private mystery, making tangible the idea of bucolic charm as a kind of refuge.  Botong’s life is impossible to relate apart from the milieu of his hometown.  For Angono was as much a part of the artist, as his memory is now stuff  of folklore. The dynamic Pictorialism of the grass and the vertical curvilinear  lines depicting the trees is different from the usual representational  distinctions between foreground and background at that time.  It demonstrated a subtle but apparent Gauguinesque approach  to art that broke away from straightforward academic Pictorialism;  curvaceous distortion is employed in depicting the grass and the ground in the foreground, and the trees in the background to serve aesthetic ends and to intensify a feeling for rhythmic form which will be more apparent in Botong’s works in the 1950s onwards. Carlos Botong Francisco belonged to the first generation Modernists who, with Edades and Galo B. Ocampo, constituted the pioneering triumvirate which attempted to change the direction of Philippine art from the tenacious influence of the Amorsolo school in new and fresh idioms of visual expression.  Botong was content with the pride of place that Angono provided.  Botong, in the words of Emmanuel Torres: “like H.R. Ocampo…turned down invitations to go abroad on study and travel grants, preferring to study Gauguin through color reproductions rather than the originals hanging in foreign museums\". In Angono, Botong refined the style he had made his own, his  personal version of Modernism grafted onto the Philippine context:  a highly attractive Pictorialism where lines flow in long, sweeping  gestures and rhythms, where the eye is seduced at every turn by  graceful arcs and curves anticipating his dynamic future murals in the 1950s.  And it creates a convincing illusion of spatial depth and  luminously atmospheric distance. Emmanuel Torres writes that the basis of Botong’s style is “…a  successful blending of formal elements in folk art…the happy result  of his researches on the art traditions which have taken root in the collective Filipino psyche.  His art has shown the way toward the  development of a distinct national idiom based not on Philippine subject matter as such but on the formal qualities reflecting an artist’s particular way of looking at things as conditioned by environment and tradition\".","lot_group":"PAINTING","lot_details_html":null,"alias":null,"hp":0,"bp":0.168,"isWithdrawn":0,"accounting_hp":0,"userBid":null,"isPaid":0,"userId":22,"lot_status":"UNSOLD","isDone":1,"bid_history_id":null,"reserve_price":null,"hammer_price":0,"fav":0},"image":[{"id":34861,"img_url":"https://leongallery.sgp1.digitaloceanspaces.com/v2/auction/46/74/lot/63.jpg","isFeatured":1}]},"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":62,"next":64,"count_bid":0,"bid_history":[],"tokenExpired":1}