{"status":true,"msg":{"data":{"id":3521,"auction_id":6,"set_id":8,"lot_number":"122","artist":"Juvenal Sansó (1929 - 2025)","title":"Window Shopping","starting_price":2000000,"signed_dated":"signed and dated 1956 (lower right)","medium":"oil on canvas","size":"24\" x 36\" (61 cm x 91 cm)","property":"PROPERTY FROM THE DON J. ANTONIO ARANETA COLLECTION","coa":"León Gallery wishes to thank Fundacion Sansó for confirming the authenticity of this lot","provenance":null,"exhibited":null,"literature":"Roces, Alfredo. Sansó. Manila: Luis Ma. Araneta, Filcapital Development Corporation, and General Bank and Trust Company. Full-color spread on pages 42 to 43 and painting description on page 40.","write_up":"Juvenal Sanso's Window Shopping is an exemplary work from the artist's coveted and rare Parisian \"Black Period\" (1953 - 1957), in which he compellingly explores themes of trauma, anguish, and alienation in a post-war milieu. In his book Sanso?, Alfredo Roces notes that the artist's \"Black Period\" was characterized by \"paintings of Goya- esque humanity, grotesque, and macabre genres of Paris life.\"<br /><br /> Window Shopping encapsulates Sanso?'s downcast Paris years and the city's post- war situation. The work at hand depicts an old man with his face worn out by depression and deprivation. He stares at a plethora of decorative objects. Still, he can only afford to gaze at these articles somberly without the money to meet their rather hefty prices. Suffering reigned in post-war Paris: people lived through meager food rations, homelessness proliferated amid a rising population (even many houses lacked decent accommodation), and general health was a concern.<br /><br />The development of Sanso?'s \"Black Period\" can be traced back to the artist's war experiences. The Philippines' involvement in World War II left terminal scars on Sanso?. Roces recounts in the same monograph: \"The war, and the period after, left permanent psychological and emotional scars on him. The senseless violence of the period, the scenes of inhumanity and depravity during the Occupation, the desperate and painfully pointless act of slaughtering civilians, and burning down large residential areas of Manila by the Japanese, were experiences that have colored Sanso's vision.\"<br /><br />After his post-war studies at the UP School of Fine Arts and the University of Santo Tomas, Sanso? left for Europe in 1951, eagerly hopeful of jumpstarting a more successful art career. He resided first in Rome before settling in Paris in 1953.<br /><br /> Sanso's early Parisian years were marked by miserable living; he merely relied on money his parents in Manila sent him. He struggled as a foreign artist in the global art capital's highly competitive atmosphere. Sanso? shares of his Parisian life in the brochure of his 1974 retrospective at the CCP: \"Going abroad is not merely buying a ticket and staying in a hotel all that...to me, it was facing myself...it was in Europe that I faced myself; I was in complete anonymity and loneliness out there, I just had to fend my way by myself.\"<br /><br /> The future tycoon, Henry Sy, whom Sanso? met by chance in Paris, said to the latter's parents upon his return to Manila: \"I could barely hold back my tears when I saw how Juvi is living in Paris!\"<br /><br /> At the time of this painting, Sanso? held his debut solo exhibition at Galerie de la Maison de Beaux-Arts in Paris. The show featured oils, watercolors, tempera, and etchings from Sanso?'s \"Black Period.\" The exhibition's opening, which, as Roces remarks, \"fell, ominously, on Good Friday,\" was a disappointment. There were hardly any guests, and Sanso? only sold \"one etching out of the entire show.\"<br /><br /> Adding to these dismal circumstances and his ingrained traumatic memory of the war, Sanso? incidentally encountered the Existentialists in the places he frequented, such as a cafe? where he likely overheard Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir talking about the human condition and position vis-a?-vis forces of power in a post-war milieu and the tensions and repercussions of the ongoing Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union and their respective allies.<br /><br /> Thus, Sanso?'s mental and emotional agony, the collective distress of the Parisians, and the sociocultural context of his times are poignantly yet arrestingly translated into his art during this era.<br /><br /> A year after this work, Sanso? would return to the Philippines and grace the halls of the storied Philippine Art Gallery, mounting his first solo exhibition in the country. (A.M.)","lot_group":"PAINTING","lot_details_html":null,"alias":null,"hp":7500000,"bp":0.168,"isWithdrawn":0,"accounting_hp":7500000,"userBid":5926,"isPaid":0,"userId":22,"lot_status":"SOLD","isDone":1,"bid_history_id":null,"reserve_price":0,"hammer_price":8760000,"fav":0},"image":[{"id":3763,"img_url":"https://leongallery.sgp1.digitaloceanspaces.com/v2/auction/6/8/lot/122.jpg","isFeatured":1},{"id":3767,"img_url":"https://leongallery.sgp1.digitaloceanspaces.com/v2/auction/6/8/lot/122a.jpg","isFeatured":0}]},"increment":[5500000,6000000,6500000,7000000,7500000,8000000,8500000,9000000,9500000,10000000,11000000,12000000,13000000,14000000,15000000,16000000,17000000,18000000,19000000,20000000],"prev":121,"next":123,"count_bid":0,"bid_history":[],"tokenExpired":1}