{"status":true,"msg":{"data":{"id":40332,"auction_id":63,"set_id":91,"lot_number":"196","artist":"Anita Magsaysay-Ho (1914-2012)","title":"Four Woman","starting_price":5000000,"signed_dated":"signed and dated 1964 (in verso)","medium":"oil on canvas","size":"22” x 30” (56 cm x 76 cm)","property":"Property FROM the COLLECTION of a distinguished couple","coa":null,"provenance":"Private Collection, Manila","exhibited":"The Metropolitan Museum of Manila, Anita Magsaysay","literature":"Guillermo, Alice G., Anita Magsaysay - Ho: A Retro","write_up":"In 1975, Leonor Orosa Gocquinco compared Anita Magsaysay Ho with the rest of the Thirteen Moderns: “...while there are moderns who may have figuratively lost themselves in the pursuit of the abstract and the abstruse — a mere hairbreadth from the obfuscated and the obscure — Anita, though avoiding the literal and the naturalistic, has through all these years kept her paintings clear, and clearly representational.  In that time, she has also created a style, a genre, a world all her own.” “We are referring, of course, to Anita Ho’s bright, usually bucolic, endlessly fascinating world of women — women at work...”  It should be noted that in Anita Magsaysay Ho’s paintings of the PAG period in the 1950s, she already had subjects of women harvesting fruits, gathering sheaves of grain, or selling fish in the market in their baro’t saya and bandana.  The celebrated artist emphasized movement and bustling interaction by means of bold, vigorous brushstrokes and strong tonal contrasts of light and dark.  (Other early neorealists, Manansala and Tabuena, were also painting women vendors and such types, but in the end, the rural women genre will be all Magsaysay Ho’s own.) Orosa Goquinco adds: “...At all events, Mrs. Ho’s world is peopled by women engaged in activity, busily occupied — usually in an everyday, but romanticized, chore.””  In subsequent works in the 1960s, she abandoned the slickness of her egg tempera and loosened up on her figurative drawing, but the charming mannequin peasants and the undulating symmetry of her compositions basically remained unchanged.  By the mid-1960s, Anita Magsaysay Ho opened up space and allowed a more leisurely disposition of her women figures which became clearly articulated and separate, the better to bring out the relationship of their movements and their serial rhythms with.  While the composition of “Four Women” is closed, there is a variety of interaction among the figures.  There is a marked  tendency to simplify forms into basic geometric shapes: triangular forms for the bandanas and rectangular forms for skirts,  and the women subjects are happily generalized and with no particularizing features.  All of which reinforce Magsaysay Ho’s position as one of the 13 Moderns while still maintaining genre themes.  Leonidas Benesa writes: “Like the neorealists, she was fascinated and affected by the discoveries of the cubists… Magsaysay  Ho was classified (as) one of the pioneers of the modern art movement in the Philippines for her angularisms and distended figurisms in her otherwise ‘representational’ paintings.”  Unlike Magsaysay Ho’s harsher lines during the 1950s, the lines in “Four Women” tend to soften with a more consistent  modelling, the light and dark tones creating a more harmonious and mellifluous effect that hinted of choreographic grace.  The style developed into paintings, with movement and greater interaction among the figures.  Leonor Orosa Gocquinco provides the conclusion; “...For these women, though barefoot and of obviously humble origins, unlike Anita — are, like Anita, of such a hieratic grace and dignity that they led a distinguished artist to exclaim to Leandro Locsin, Filipino architect and owner of several Ho paintings: “I could venerate those women.  I could bow down and kiss their feet!”  Finally, Orosa Goquinco described Magsaysay Ho, the icon respected by society: “If Mrs. Ho’s paintings have come to lend a  distinctive touch to many of Forbes Park’s palatial residences, she herself mingles, easily and gracefully, with the guests at  dinners in those mansions; often she is the guest of honor at bienvenidas and despedidas tendered by socialite friends.”","lot_group":"Painting","lot_details_html":"<p><strong>Anita Magsaysay-Ho</strong> (1914-2012)<br /><em>Four Women</em><br />signed and dated 1964 (in verso)<br />oil on canvas<br />22&rdquo; x 30&rdquo; (56 cm x 76 cm)</p>","alias":null,"hp":20500000,"bp":0.168,"isWithdrawn":0,"accounting_hp":20500000,"userBid":null,"isPaid":0,"userId":22,"lot_status":"SOLD","isDone":1,"bid_history_id":null,"reserve_price":null,"hammer_price":23944000,"fav":0},"image":[{"id":39021,"img_url":"https://leongallery.sgp1.digitaloceanspaces.com/v2/auction/63/91/lot/196.jpg","isFeatured":1}]},"increment":[],"prev":195,"next":197,"count_bid":0,"bid_history":[],"tokenExpired":1}