{"status":true,"msg":{"data":{"id":41053,"auction_id":67,"set_id":95,"lot_number":"121","artist":"Vicente Manansala (1910-1981)","title":"Vendors","starting_price":2000000,"signed_dated":"signed and dated 1972 (lower right)","medium":"oil on canvas","size":"39 1/4” x 41” 1/4 (100 cm x 105 cm)","property":null,"coa":null,"provenance":"Acquired directly from the artist","exhibited":null,"literature":null,"write_up":"As a member of the Thirteen Moderns of the late 1940s and the groundbreaking Neo-realists of the 1950s, Manansala was at the forefront of the modernist movement in the country.  Shunning Amorsolo’s rural idylls, Manansala developed an imagery based on the postwar urban experience.   Manansala’s art exemplified a solution to the aesthetic  problems of the 1950s in terms of the use of modem Western idioms and their local transformations, and in terms of the subject matter and content of art reflective of a people’s identity.  Through the 1960s, as a leading member of the PAG, Manansala moved on from strength to strength, and already dislaying the qualities of “Pinoy” baroque: a festive spirit, love of image clusters or that fear of emptiness (horror vacui) which compelled the artist to fill every space with busy detail, and flattened perspectives. Shunning Amorsolo’s rural idylls, Manansala developed an imagery based on the postwar urban experience.  The city of Manila, through the vision of the artist, assumed a strong folk character.   Manansala’s vision of the city and his fundamentally native Filipino approach to his subjects would influence numerous artists who took up his folk themes within an urban context,  “Vendors” is a classic example of how Manansala’s approach entails an intrinsic hefting of visual weights- one object or  image, such as the vendor at the left balanced or neutralized by others in the proximity, such as the mother and child at  the right and the girl at the center.Manansala stayed close to the figures which he simplified to their basic geometric shape.    “Vendors” exemplifies Manansala’s abstraction that is more at home with subject mater- specifically the human figure- than  without it. It also welcomed the decorative element found in folk, popular and indigenous arts and crafts. Aside from the  vendor and mother and child, both of which are frequent subjects by Manansala, other objects and images almost fill the  canvas. Fruits, fishes and objects abound, on the head of the women or under their arms or hands. Manansala plunged into cubism but did not let it overwhelm him.  He coined a word for the kind of Cubism he eventually  perfected as his own: “Transparent Cubism.” Manansala reinterpreted or indigenized cubism as he drew his themes from the familiar Filipino environment.  Unlike analytical cubism, which arbitrarily fragments and dissects the figure into complex abstract compositions with only clues of the subject remaining, the cubist aspect of his work rests largely on the geometric faceting of forms and in the shifting and overlapping of planes.   Surprisingly, the insight into what Manansala calls transparent cubism dawned on him while strolling the streets of Paris. Yet the austere, sometimes highly intellectualized style of cubism emerged from the hands of Manansala as something free and capable of sensuousness. Cubism in France uses objects or images sparingly. Manansala’s objects and images almost fill the canvas.  Manansala’s vision of the city and his fundamentally native Filipino approach to his subjects would influence numerous artists who took up his folk themes within an urban context.Among those who show his influence are Mauro Malang Santos, with his own version of folk romanticism in paintings which convey the fragile, makeshift character of the 1950s, and others from the University of Santo Tomas where Manansala taught for a time, such as Antonio Austria, Angelito Antonio, and Mario Parial. Like him, they draw their inspiration from the folk, their occupations and pleasures, and Manuel BaIdemor, whose roots are in Paete, Laguna, as well as some Laguna lakeshore artists all of them who would shape their own sensuous ,colorful more ruggedly folksy visual language. Vicente Manansala has reaped a harvest of awards in his lengthy career. He won first prize for Barong-barong in the 1950 Manila Grand Opera House Exhibition. His awards from the Art Association of the Philippines include: third prize, Banaklaot, 1948; second prize, Kahig (Scratch), 1953,second prize, Fish Vendors, 1955; third prize, Best Served, Well-Gained, 1955; second prize, Give Us This Day, 1962; and best in show, Give Us This Day, 1962. He received the Republic Cultural Heritage Award in 1963. He also received the Patnubay ng Sining at Kalinangan Award from the City of Manila in 1970. He was proclaimed  National Artist in Painting in 1982","lot_group":"PAINTING","lot_details_html":null,"alias":null,"hp":8000000,"bp":0.168,"isWithdrawn":0,"accounting_hp":8000000,"userBid":null,"isPaid":0,"userId":22,"lot_status":"SOLD","isDone":1,"bid_history_id":null,"reserve_price":null,"hammer_price":9344000,"fav":0},"image":[{"id":40191,"img_url":"https://leongallery.sgp1.digitaloceanspaces.com/v2/auction/67/95/lot/121.jpg","isFeatured":1}]},"increment":[5500000,6000000,6500000,7000000,7500000,8000000,8500000,9000000,9500000,10000000,11000000,12000000,13000000,14000000,15000000,16000000,17000000,18000000,19000000,20000000],"prev":120,"next":122,"count_bid":0,"bid_history":[],"tokenExpired":1}