{"status":true,"msg":{"data":{"id":37038,"auction_id":47,"set_id":75,"lot_number":"74","artist":"Vicente Manansala (1910-1981)","title":"Mother and Child","starting_price":7000000,"signed_dated":"signed and dated 1973 (upper right)","medium":"oil on canvas","size":"22 1/4”x 35” (57 cm x 89 cm)","property":null,"coa":null,"provenance":"Acquired directly from the artist","exhibited":null,"literature":null,"write_up":"The subjects convey a presence that consists of the combination  of vulnerability in the lack of social embellishments and dignity and  solidity in the broadly structured lines. Structured into planes and  facets, the mother and child in the hammock acquire an essential  simplicity and purity amid the decorative patterns of the details.  At 19, Manansala was the youngest in the class that finally  graduated from the UP School of Fine Arts. Among Manansalas’  classicist teachers were Fernando and Pablo Amorsolo, Fabian  de la Rosa, Vicente Rivera y Mir, Ramon Peralta, Teodoro  Buenaventura - names which are today engraved in Philippine art  history. All of his grades were excellent except one. A professor  wanted him to use fine strokes; he liked bold strokes and took a  failing grade for his independent mind. Apparently his talent is not  meant for the classroom. This painting was done in 1944. Four  years later, in 1948, he was to become a UNESCO scholarship  grantee. Later, he was to study at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris.  Many have sung praises for his ebullient colors, his sensuous shapes  bursting with “baroque” curves or contours, his brisk, lively strokes.  Manansala can compress much of the festive spirit and love of the  simple life. The evidence of his best known works is that of a man  whose cup runneth over.  Throughout his career, Manansala continually alternated between  greater abstraction and greater figuration; though his figurative  works often contain abstract elements. Manansala indulged in  subtle faceting and the use of vibrant color, discarding the  conventions of natural forms. In this painting, the mother and the  sleeping child are done in meticulous and detailed yet abbreviated  style, yet with no hint of the synthetic cubism which he was to  innovate later in his career.    Manansala blends the mother and child (in the hammock) into the  overall ethereal mood of transparence, reflection, iridescence, luminous  coloring, opalescence, flowing forms and volumes, all are defined and  held in transparent cubism all Manansala’s own, eliminating any  heavyhanded sense of grit and toil.  It doesn’t mean that Manansala did not subscribe to the social  consciousness aesthetic. The artist has had an abiding sympathy for  common folk like beggars and vendors. Color takes new meanings in  the hands of Manansala. Color becomes an inquiry into visual relationships  that range from the backdrop atmosphere to the controlled pictorial  forms of the two farmer figures. Beneath the surface gloss and visual  exuberance can be seen a craftsmanship honed by many years of study  of the works by Picasso, Braque and Gris, and especially his teacher  Leger. It is interesting to draw comparisons between the handling of  his subjects before and after his training under Leger in Paris. Before  his Parisian sojourn, the subtlety of form as explored by color was  emphasized. Decades later, clarity of light through his own transparent  cubism is what he would explore.  Manansala’s own take on cubism grew out of a seething era of inquiry  and experiment, with his generation of modernist artists seeking to make  iconic Filipino imagery as their vehicle for their unique modernist visions  and forms.  The Neo-realists, of which Manansala was a member, perceived  abstract art as taking two directions. One is non-naturalistic, in which  subject matter is altered or transformed by simplification, distortion,  fragmentation or deconstruction to give greater prominence to line,  color, volume, pattern, composition, and paint quality. The result is  representational abstraction.  As seen in the works of Neo-realists Manansala, Tabuena, and Legaspi, it  takes perceived reality as a starting point: but instead reproducing it with  the accuracy of direct observation, they recreate it in ways that strongly  emphasize the purely plastic and organizational qualities of a painting.  Describing the result as abstract becomes a matter of comparative  degree. That is to say, some works are more abstract than others with  respect to how much of subject matter is reduced in terms of likeness to  natural appearance.","lot_group":"PAINTING","lot_details_html":null,"alias":null,"hp":11000000,"bp":0.168,"isWithdrawn":0,"accounting_hp":11000000,"userBid":5927,"isPaid":0,"userId":22,"lot_status":"SOLD","isDone":1,"bid_history_id":null,"reserve_price":null,"hammer_price":12848000,"fav":0},"image":[{"id":35063,"img_url":"https://leongallery.sgp1.digitaloceanspaces.com/v2/auction/47/75/lot/74.jpg","isFeatured":1}]},"increment":[11000000,12000000,13000000,14000000,15000000,16000000,17000000,18000000,19000000,20000000],"prev":73,"next":75,"count_bid":0,"bid_history":[],"tokenExpired":1}