{"status":true,"msg":{"data":{"id":38750,"auction_id":54,"set_id":82,"lot_number":"30","artist":"Vicente Manansala  (1910-1981)","title":"The Candle-Sellers","starting_price":6000000,"signed_dated":"signed and dated 1962 (upper left)","medium":"oil on canvas","size":"27” x 37” (69 cm x 94 cm)","property":"FROM THE WILLIAM AND JUNE GARGIULO\nCOLLECTION, MICHIGAN, USA.","coa":null,"provenance":"William “Bill” Gargiulo; The Gargiulos acquired the Manansala “The Candle-Sellers” in the course of Billy’s assignment in the Philippines, sometime in July of 1962","exhibited":null,"literature":null,"write_up":"Garcia succeeded  the immensely popular Ramon Magsaysay after  he perished in a plane crash and became famous  in his own right as the founder of the ‘Filipino First’ movement that favored Philippine businessmen over  foreign interests.\nThe Gargiulos acquired the Manansala “The  Candle-Sellers” in the course of Billy’s assignment  in the Philippines, sometime in July of 1962, along  with the Zobel “Acinipo #390” also featured  in this auction.\nIt was no accident that Vicente Silva Manansala set up his atelier  in Binangonan, the town next to the Angono made famous by Carlos ‘Botong’ Villaluz Francisco.  Manansala, after all, was renowned as an unabashed disciple of the legendary Botong.  As early as 1930,  Manansala — who perhaps styled himself “Enteng” with the same  smalltown-boy charm as the nickname ‘Botong’ suggested — had  found himself felicitously in the orbit of the master muralist.  The two apparently had a joint exhibit at the Philippine Vistas in Intramuros.   (Philippine Vistas was the first commercial art gallery founded under  the American regime;  while the first-ever art gallery in the country was the ‘Arte’ founded by Alfonso Ongpin at the turn of the century.)\nFor both Botong and Manansala, it was to be the first exhibition  of their works;  for Manansala, then only 20 years old, it was a greater, career-defining moment to find himself in such august company.  He had just graduated from the University of the Philippines’ School of Fine Arts the previous year, as the youngest member of his class.\nUnlike Botong, however, Manansala was a city boy through and  through.  Although he reveled later in life in the countryside landscapes that he would do for private enjoyment, he first achieved fame and  fortune with characters plucked from Manila’s chaos.  He would  immortalize women queuing for rice rations (in “Pila sa Bigas”), hawkers of vegetables and fish, vendors from the teeming markets as well as their families gathered around a very meager repast of dried fish and rice.   \nHis “Madonna of the Slums” (1950) is considered a key Filipino  modernist work, which situated the iconic Mother and Child amid  a ramshackle vista of ‘informal settlers’.  It was nothing short  of revolutionary.\nHis prize-winning work “Barong-Barong #1 (The Shanties #1)”  would reap the First Prize at the Art Association of the Philippines’ semi-annual exhibition, in 1951 held at the Manila Grand Opera House.  Manansala would best titans Anita Magsaysay-Ho and  Hernando R. Ocampo, who would come in at second and third  place, respectively.  (Another artwork titled “Barong-Barong #2  (The Shanties #2)” would also snag an Honorable Mention in the same competition.)  These wins would establish Manansala  as an artist to reckon with.  It must have been hugely satisfying  for Manansala that he would repeat Botong Francisco’s feat  of taking home the Art Association’s First Prize three years earlier  in 1948.  (Botong had won with “Kaingin (The Farmers that Slash  and Burn)”, which told the tale of a destitute countryside, at the  AAP’s very first competition.)\nThese themes of urban decay would likewise set the tone of his  successful career.  Like the characters in his paintings, Enteng grew up in ‘a single, crowded room in Intramuros’, living there until it was razed to the ground with the rest of the old city at the end of World War II.  He was a scrappy boy, who began working as a bootblack when he was just 11;  next, as an overzealous newspaper boy at age 16.  (He hawked his wares so loudly that he lost his voice, forcing  him to return to shining shoes.)  Manansala would remember that  he himself would ironically not own a decent pair of shoes until  he was 17. \nIf Botong would paint of the people and places he knew in the bucolic fields and lakeshores of Angono, Enteng would paint his own poetry of the urban jungle.\nIn the artwork at hand, “The Candle-Sellers”, Manansala etches the figures of two women on the sidewalk outside the famous Quiapo Church, found in the busiest district of the metropolis and  well-known for such folk expressions of the Catholic faith.   The women offer not just the usual tapers to be lit inside the  church to speed one’s prayers heavenward, but also candles shaped  as human figures: representing both good and perhaps, more  mischievous intentions.  (Traditionally, red candles were lit to ensure good fortune in business, white candles were supposedly for peace  of mind.  Red candles in the form of human figures, on the other hand, were intended to wake the conscience of those for whom  the prayers were made.)  The sellers in the painting are veiled,  as was the tradition in those pre-Vatican II days, their faces frozen  in inscrutable masks.  The women are barefoot as Manansala also liked to remember that he was.\nThe focus in this painting, however, is not so much these female  vendors but the inanimate shapes and forms of the candles, that  even unlit, seem to be sparked with an energetic life force.  As the  curator Ramon Villegas once opined, Manansala was never  a pessimistic soul and his works always burned brightly with hope,  no matter how bleak his surroundings were — offering an insight  into what makes this modernist master so universally appealing.\nVicente S. Manansala, like his mentor Carlos ‘Botong’ V. Francisco, would also be named Philippine National Artist for the Visual Arts  in 1982.\n-Lisa Guerrero Nakpil","lot_group":"PAINTING","lot_details_html":"<p><strong>Vicente Manansala</strong> (1910-1981)<br /><em>The Candle-Sellers</em><br />signed and dated 1962 (upper left) <br />oil on canvas<br />27&rdquo; x 37&rdquo; (69 cm x 94 cm)</p>","alias":null,"hp":16000000,"bp":0.168,"isWithdrawn":0,"accounting_hp":16000000,"userBid":null,"isPaid":0,"userId":22,"lot_status":"SOLD","isDone":1,"bid_history_id":null,"reserve_price":null,"hammer_price":18688000,"fav":0},"image":[{"id":37134,"img_url":"https://leongallery.sgp1.digitaloceanspaces.com/v2/auction/54/82/lot/30.jpg","isFeatured":1}]},"increment":[11000000,12000000,13000000,14000000,15000000,16000000,17000000,18000000,19000000,20000000],"prev":29,"next":0,"count_bid":0,"bid_history":[],"tokenExpired":1}