{"status":true,"msg":{"data":{"id":38797,"auction_id":54,"set_id":82,"lot_number":"79","artist":"Vicente Manansala (1910-1981)","title":"Market Scene","starting_price":12000000,"signed_dated":"signed and dated 1980 (upper left)","medium":"oil on canvas","size":"43” x 60” (109 cm x 152 cm)","property":"Property FROM the COLLECTION \nof a very distinguished FAMILY","coa":null,"provenance":"Acquired directly from the artist","exhibited":null,"literature":null,"write_up":"Even within the confines of a picture frame, Manansala’s strengths as a muralist are evident  in “Market Scene” and the power of this painting comes from the highly detailed presentation of numerous figures in a row, seven members of a rural family, horizontally filling up the pictorial field. Manansala has famously painted memorable murals: the most sensitive of them being the fourteen stations of the Cross on the walls of the Chapel of the Holy Sacrifice in the U.P. Campus; as are in some of the buildings of the International Rice Research Institute in Los Banos, Laguna.\nIn 1982, Beth Day Romulo wrote: “His paintings abound with brilliant, emotion packed images of the common barrio folk  of the Philippines. One portrays the bone weary drudgery  of workers in the rice fields; another captures the gaunt dignity  of market women; still another shows the dark anguish  of a mother who has lost her husband. “ ‘Take my hand,' the  artist seems to be saying, ‘I will show you beauty, sorrow and joy in the world I know. If you want to know the ageless soul in the peasant, I will show you.’“\nManansala’s transparent cubist paintings had, while they had a recognizable voice of their own, were using a borrowed language, a language abstracted from classic modernists like his famous Parisian mentor Leger yet spoken with an indigenously Filipino accent.  Manansala was of course, influenced by other artists such as Picasso, Braque, Gris and Klee. But it is the folk substance that he shares with Botong which gave his paintings their distinct signature.\nBefore his sojourn in France, he counted among his teachers  Fernando and Pablo Amorsolo, Fabian de la Rosa, Vicente Rivera y Mir, Ramon Peralta, Teodoro Buenaventura- names which are engraved in Philippine Art History.\nWhile he never brought on any sense of social critique to his art, Manansala had an abiding sympathy for the common folk like vendors. In this work, however, the subject takes a backseat  in favor of composition and design.\nThe central figure, presumably the father of the family, conveys  a presence that consists of the combination of vulnerability: the lack  of social embellishments is replaced by the fighting cock, and dignity  and solidity in the broadly structured lines.\nHis fiercely modernist transparent cubism aside, there are still the old spirits of the Classical and the Romantic in his art.\nThe Classic in Manansala still abides by the dictum that “Art should aim  at noble simplicity and calm grandeur”. The Romantic in Manansala discovers the importance of color in painting.\nHe used a lively palette on a subject that could easily have fallen into the unrelieved somber and gloomy colors of realist genre painters.  All figures emerge from what almost looks like a fragmented stained glass symphony of fiesta colors.  It should be remembered that during the 1950s, courtesy of the U.S. State Department, he studied stained glass techniques in New York City,\nYet the artist brings out the humanism of the subjects in their gaunt, faceted faces which had reached the ultimate degree of abstraction joined to the real.\nManansala even reincarnates his iconic 1950 “Madonna of the Slums”  with what can be called the Madonna of the Marketplace, what with the flattened woven basket of food on the head of the  mother, with her child held up by an arm.  She has a keen, wary look, and the child reaching up to his mother’s face in a protective gesture against the uncertainties of life.\nOn the whole, his romantic leanings burst forth in expressions of vivacity, gaiety and luminous colors in this masterpiece: a family, including the ubiquitous image of a mother and child, headed for the market.\nVicente Manansala significantly contributed to the development  of Philippine genre in the modernist idiom for at the same time,  he evolved his own style of transparent cubism, an indigenization  of the original Paris style.  But unlike Paris cubism which fragmented  the human form, the cubism of Manansala did not so much cut  up the human figure but reorganized it in facets or transparent planes.\n“Tomorrow is another day…!” goes the last line of a famous film from 1939, and this painting by Manansala has the drama of a final scene  in an old, old movie — with the dramatis personae- members of a rural family of market vendors- walking towards an auspicious future.","lot_group":"PAINTING","lot_details_html":"<p><strong>Vicente Manansala</strong> (1910-1981) <br /><em>Market Scene</em> <br />signed and dated 1980 (upper left) <br />oil on canvas <br />43&rdquo; x 60&rdquo; (109 cm x 152 cm)</p>","alias":null,"hp":28000000,"bp":0.168,"isWithdrawn":0,"accounting_hp":28000000,"userBid":null,"isPaid":0,"userId":22,"lot_status":"SOLD","isDone":1,"bid_history_id":null,"reserve_price":null,"hammer_price":32704000,"fav":0},"image":[{"id":37213,"img_url":"https://leongallery.sgp1.digitaloceanspaces.com/v2/auction/54/82/lot/79.jpg","isFeatured":1}]},"increment":[],"prev":78,"next":80,"count_bid":0,"bid_history":[],"tokenExpired":1}